The 500: A Novel (15 page)

One day at the beach, I found myself on the business end of it. She’d been asking me about what I did and about what business I had with her father. “You work directly with Henry Davies?” she asked.

It seemed like she was feeling me out to see if I was a big-timer. She sat very close, in a bikini top and cutoff jeans, and every so often, she would lean over to shoo away a bug, brushing her breasts lightly against my shoulder. All in all, it was a very convincing performance. The girl was sharp, you could tell, and those eyes melted me like a mind-control ray. But I’d seen enough in my time at the Davies Group to beware of curious women bearing big boobs, so I did my best to shut her down. Indifference wasn’t enough, however. She was working from the film noir guide to playing a hussy. After a few minutes of my giving her the runaround, she stared me in the eyes. “You scared of bad girls?”

“Terrified,” I replied, and turned once more to my beach reading (“The Theory of Regulatory Capture,” a real page-turner). She took a few steps back, still fixing me with that bedroom look, then pivoted and walked off, sure to find some trouble at the shady end of the beach.

It could almost have been comic, even endearing, to see the girl take delight in her newfound power: the way she could use sex like a crowbar against even the most self-possessed men. Except she didn’t seem like some playful Lolita. She had the practiced confidence of a courtesan. And who was I to talk? I had to sit there on the seawall, reading and playing it nonchalant as I waited for my traitor hard-on to finally give up hope.

I had already met two of Rado’s subordinates—Miroslav and Aleksandar—in DC. They were garden-variety Euro-trash goons, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that Rado was a class act. He always wore a beautifully tailored suit, seemed to lack sweat glands even down here in the tropics, and was always saying things like “You’ll forgive me if…” and “whomsoever” with a little hint of an accent and totally making it work.

His house was about half a mile above the village where Henry and I were staying. One evening, Miroslav, Aleksandar, Rado, Henry, and I were drinking prosecco in Rado’s garden and watching the sunset. Rado picked out a few herbs he would use in that night’s dinner, explaining their subtleties as he bruised them gently with his fingertips and smelled the oils.

The whole house was open to the ocean breeze. He steered us back into the kitchen and laid out the finer points of steak tartare, namely: it was all about the freshness, of the eggs, sure, but mostly the meat.

He took his jacket off (the first time I’d seen him in shirtsleeves), rolled his cuffs up to his elbows, and had Miroslav bring a side of beef from the walk-in fridge downstairs.

“They killed Flor about two hours ago,” Rado said, and slapped the carcass lovingly. With a long knife of Damascus steel, he cut the tenderloin from the spine in one clean stroke, and set to work slicing off the fat and skin.

“I like to do my butchering myself,” he said with a smile.

I was itching to get down to business. Vacations make me anxious. I like to be busy, and after seeing Rado’s knife skills I wasn’t too keen on being in Irin’s sights. She had come downstairs in a see-through wrap and was making eyes at me from across the table as she ate an apple. Henry’s assistant, Margaret, had arrived as well.

Rado kept the chatter going more or less nonstop through the six-course dinner. However delicious the grub, after sitting through disquisitions on the most succulent grilled Mediterranean songbird (warbler), the most trenchant of Emir Kusturica’s early films (
Underground
), and the best rye for a proper Sazerac (Van Winkle Family Reserve), I couldn’t stop myself; I’d put my ass on the line to nail Walker for this guy and I just wanted to know what he wanted and how much he was willing to pay.

“So, Mr. Dragović, how can we help you in Washington?” I asked. The little dinner party reacted like I’d just shit in the punch.

Henry saved me by changing the subject. “So who’s making the best absinthe these days?” he asked Rado, and our host, after giving me a patronizing smile, took up the new subject.

These fucking southern Europeans. They won’t discuss business at the dinner table. So after four hours, dinner became dessert became coffee became drinks. Rado pulled out a bottle of some nasty-looking black liquor with Asian characters on the label and started pouring. I couldn’t really tell you what it tasted like because after the tiniest sip, it was as if my whole mouth had been hit with a double shot of Novocain. I felt instantly unwell.

Finally, Rado suggested that we men take our drinks and adjourn to the library. What a relief. Brass tacks at last.

Rado refilled our glasses, and I thought I saw something floating in the bottle of Far East booze.

Henry laid out the terms of the arrangement. He was strictly no bullshit. No lawyers. No retainers. A simple handshake deal. You give us twenty million, we write your law into the books: official American statute, passed through both houses and signed by the president himself. It would be tacked onto a larger bill, but law was law. If Davies Group didn’t deliver, Rado would owe us nothing.

Rado seemed content to draw this whole thing out.

“The more laws, the less justice,” he said, and took a sip of his drink.

Here we go…fucking Cicero quotes. I might as well make myself comfortable.

“This
soju
is from North Korea,” he said. “Very rare. Aged seven years and reserved for the Party elite.”

He topped up our drinks once again, and yeah, there was no mistaking it: a dead black snake was floating in the bottle.

“An adder,” he said, noticing my gaze. “The venom gives it a certain sweetness.”

Cheers.

“Twenty million American dollars,” he said, and started pacing, gazing off at a few lights bobbing on the Caribbean.

That’s as far as he got. I guess it was part of some negotiating strategy, but on this occasion, it wasn’t going to work. Someone knocked on the door.

A servant appeared with a note for Henry. He read it, consulted with Rado for a moment, and then the Serb said, “Of course, send him up.”

Three minutes later Marcus appeared, all apologies, looking rumpled as hell and holding a digital recorder in his hand. He was supposed to have been on the trip, but something last-minute had kept him in DC. He whispered to Henry, and they both excused themselves.

When he was discussing something weighty or confidential, Marcus had a habit of putting on music. I guess it was some old fear of being bugged. Sure enough, soon an aria came streaming from a little side room where he and Henry had secreted themselves.

They returned about ten minutes later with dead-serious looks on their faces. Henry asked for a moment alone with Rado. I didn’t know what was happening but I was fairly certain of one thing: Rado should have jumped at the twenty million, because it seemed like the price had just gone up.

Miroslav, Aleksandar, and I waited outside for twenty-five minutes as Henry and Rado consulted in the library. Despite the high-octane
soju,
I had been sobered up by the surprise appearance of Marcus. I wondered if they were pulling their own little con on Rado with some breaking news to jack the price up.

If they were, I wasn’t in on it. When Henry and Rado emerged from the library, they didn’t say a word about what had gone down, just kept whispering by themselves in the corner. Marcus gave the tape recorder to Henry’s assistant, probably for transcription.

I waited as patiently as I could, then finally approached Henry and Marcus. “What’s happening?” I asked.

“We’re going to have to keep this compartmentalized,” Marcus said. In other words:
Butt out.

Fair enough. I didn’t have to know everything, though the last time I went into a situation with incomplete information, I nearly got plowed by a 280-pound dude named Squeak and ended up in jail. At the very least I needed to know how this affected my end of the Walker-Rado deal.

“Okay,” I said. “Just let me know what the next play is with Walker.”

Marcus and Henry exchanged a bad-news look for a moment. I guess Henry decided to take the bullet. He laid a hand on my shoulder and said, “We’re going to have to take you off this one, Mike.”

I was stunned. I blinked at the two of them like an idiot. “What? I slip up with etiquette once at dinner and that’s it, I’m gone?”

“That’s not it at all,” Marcus said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“This is no longer a simple matter of adding an amendment to a law,” Henry said. “Things have changed. We’re working an entirely different order of magnitude here. It would be too much too soon for you, Mike.”

I could have whined about being dragged to South America when I had work piling up in DC, about wasting a week, about how sick I was of them keeping me in the dark, but it wouldn’t have done any good.

“I earned this,” I said. “I took the risk. I hooked Walker. I’m ready for the responsibility. Bring me in. I won’t let you down.”

“We’re trying to protect you here. You’re on track to be a player. Let this case go, for your own sake. It’s the kind of thing where you make one wrong move and you’re fucked. Irrevocably fucked.”

I mulled it over for a minute, then let it go. “Message received,” I said. “Thanks for being straight with me.”

I left them to their thing and took a stroll outside. I wondered if they’d bought it, my good-soldier routine. Because if they thought I could just drop this—turn off a lifetime of being a sneak as if I were throwing a switch and let them run me blind a second time—they knew a lot less about human behavior than they claimed to.

I had to find out what was happening with Rado’s case and what was on that tape. Simple curiosity was at play, sure, and some of it was ego: I’d put the hard work in and I deserved a part in whatever play they were mapping out. There was more to it than that, however. I’d been wary of Davies and Marcus ever since they’d gotten me mixed up in the Walker shakedown. I was the point man on the Walker-Rado deal so far, and I had to make sure that if this new plan of theirs fell apart, I wouldn’t be the one left holding the bag. If I happened to find some dirt, a little leverage to use against my bosses, insurance I could hide away in case of emergency, that wouldn’t hurt either. I knew Henry had hired me in part because I’m a sneaky bastard, and I certainly didn’t want to disappoint him.

Henry and Marcus were going to stick around the house for a while and map out a response to whatever big news had changed the game plan with Rado. Margaret, Henry’s assistant, was heading back to our guesthouse in town with Marcus’s digital recorder, presumably to get to work on transcribing the tape.

Of course I offered to walk her home. You never knew what unsavory characters might be lurking in a town like this.

I took her just slightly out of the way, a block or two over toward the boatyards and auto shops, which meant we would have to walk along the beach for a few minutes to get back to our hotel.

Henry’s assistant carried the recorder in her hand. She’d been Henry’s secretary for decades, both in and out of government. In her midfifties, hair always in a bun and wearing perfectly pressed clothes, she was the human equivalent of a safe. That tape was key to whatever big news Marcus and Henry had received, but she certainly wasn’t just going to let me give it a little listen. I knew that once that tape got back to Washington, it was going directly into Henry’s vault, and that was one formidable piece of hardware.

I’d seen him come out of it one day. It was concealed behind a false panel in his office. Henry’s letting me get a glimpse might seem like a security misstep, but my knowing where that vault was didn’t even matter, because it was a monster, another Sargent and Greenleaf. It would take an expert twenty undisturbed hours to crack it. If I wanted to listen to that tape, I had to get it in Colombia.

I kept up a patter as we walked, and soon enough we had company. Margaret glanced back over her shoulder, then took a second look. After that, she stared straight ahead and picked up the pace as her whole posture tightened up.

“Someone’s following us,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Just stay calm.” I looked back. A tall, wiry black-indigenous guy in his midforties was following us. He had unkempt hair and a beard streaked with gray.

A palm grove blocked the moon.

“It’s too dark for me to check,” I said. “Did you see what colors he was wearing back there in the light? It wasn’t green and white, was it?”

Margaret hesitated for a moment as she thought about it. “Yes. What does that mean?”

“Could be gang,” I said, and frowned. “We’ll probably be all right as long as we don’t flash anything valuable.”

She showed me the digital recorder, shiny silver and $350 retail, in her palm. She was wearing a dress, so she had no pockets, and she had left her purse back in the guesthouse. “Can you hide this?” she asked.

“I’ve got a money belt,” I said. She handed over the recorder. The guy following us sped up, and we tried to keep our distance. About fifty meters from the hotel, our new friend started mumbling something. Margaret nearly sprinted to the front door.

Sting accomplished. Now for the blow-off.

“Great,” I said, and pointed around the corner. “I think I see some Ejército guys.” The Colombian army was all over the coast. Seeing sixteen-year-olds walking around with mortars on their vests and live Galil assault rifles can be a little disconcerting when you first get to Colombia, but you realize quickly they’re only here to stop Yankees from getting kidnapped, and occasionally to shake down the locals.

“I’ll tell them to keep an eye out,” I said. “You head upstairs.”

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” Always the martyr, old Mike.

She went inside.

There were no soldiers around the corner. The dude in green and white was about fifteen feet away. He sidled up to me and whispered, “Ganja. Coke. Ganja. Coke.”

“No, thanks, Ramón,” I said. I gave him about three dollars in pesos for his trouble, then went around to the rear stairwell of the guesthouse and up to my room.