Down Here

Pryce shifted posture, as if his spine hurt, but his pale eyes stayed chemical-cold. “You think those people wiring up their own children and sending them into crowded markets in Israel are revolutionaries? Wake up. They’re fucking flesh-peddlers, selling their kids for the bounty. It’s the most lucrative form of child labor ever invented. You know what the bounty is up to now? Fifty grand. Fifty thousand dollars, for people who don’t know what an indoor toilet is. For people whose other kids are going to grow up to be cannon fodder, anyway. The car-bombers, the one-way pilots, the . . . For all of them, who’s putting up the money? Not the terrorists themselves, my friend. The little princes who finance them.”

I didn’t say anything. What could I?

“It’s been more than two years since the World Trade Center,” Pryce said, softly. “I guess the scumbags thought they were safe in their little sleeper-cells. They knew, if we’d had that book, we would have rounded them up a long time ago. So, therefore, we didn’t have it, see?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And the case against Wolfe—”

“It’s gone,” he assured me. “And it’s never coming back. One of the bodies in that truck they found out in Queens? It was Wychek.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said, no expression on his new face. “That book, it was what he was holding over . . . the agency. That’s why they gave him—”

“I don’t care.”

“But if you got the book from . . . ?”

“I didn’t get the book from him,” I said. “And that’s the truth.”

“Why did you just hand it over?” Pryce asked me, his eyes everyplace but on mine. “You had to have some idea of what it could be worth. You’re a merc yourself. How come you didn’t try to make some kind of a deal? When you reached out for me, I thought that was what you were angling for.”

“It’s not true, what they say,” I told him. “You know, that everyone’s got a price. I know people like that. I was raised with them. I’ll never be a citizen. But I’ll never be them, either.”

^“Mayday!” Hauser, on the phone.

I met him an hour later, in the park across the street from the Appellate Division courthouse.

“I was in Atlanta, on assignment,” he said. “Just got back. Turns out, a while back, a woman came to my house in Westchester. It was about four in the afternoon, right after school. My wife was at her Wednesday tennis lesson. One of the kids answered the door. Long story short, when she left, she knew damn well that you’re not me.”

“She saw a photo of you?”

“More than that,” he said, ruefully. “I’ve got great kids. They’re proud of their father. So, when a woman shows up and says Daddy’s getting an award . . .”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know exactly when, but it was a while back, only I just now found out about it,” Hauser said, impatiently. “Kids, they forget things. . . .”

Images of Laura Reinhardt flooded my mind. They turned slowly, like a roulette wheel near the end of its spin. I watched as she built her “business model” as meticulously as she had her bottle tree.

With her own hands. Unrestrained.

“Some kids do,” I told Hauser.

Then I hung up. On all of it.

The waiter cleared away the remnants of our meal, asked us if we wanted dessert. Laura Reinhardt raised her eyebrows at me. “I could go for a little torta,” I said.

She held up two fingers.

“Now, that may have been going too far,” she said, patting her lips with a white napkin when she was done. She leaned back in her chair, seemed to think better of it, and bent toward me. I lit another cigarette for her.

“Tell me about the book,” she said.

“You’ve been reading about the death-penalty cases—the ones where they find out, years later, that a man sentenced to death was innocent all along?”

“I’ve seen things on TV, that’s all.”

“It’s a national scandal,” I said, locking her eyes with my sincerity. “In Illinois, the last governor canceled every single pending execution before he left office. He said he just couldn’t be sure that people on death row are really guilty. In one case, this guy was accused of raping and murdering a little girl. Turned out it wasn’t him.”

“How would they—?”

“Sometimes, it’s DNA,” I told her. “Sometimes, believe it or not, the actual criminal confesses—usually when they’ve caught him on a whole bunch of other things. Sometimes, it’s as simple as an alibi they never checked out. But it always comes down to the same thing, which is what my book’s about.”

“Innocence?”

“No. I mean, innocence is a part of it, but that’s not the theme, not the . . . drive- force. I’m trying to go deeper. These things aren’t due to incompetence. Well, some of them are, sure. But the dark underbelly to all this is the kind of people who become prosecutors. I’m not talking about corruption, either—although that happens, too—I’m talking about people who have lost their way.”

“Prosecutors?”

“Prosecutors. Some of them lose sight of the difference between fighting crime and fighting criminals.”

“I don’t see the difference myself,” she said. “If you fight criminals, you do fight crime, isn’t that true?”

“In that order, yes,” I agreed. “But not when it’s reversed.”

“How could it be—?”

“A child is murdered. A woman is raped. A building is torched, and a fireman dies when the roof collapses. A . . . You know the type of crime I’m talking about. Public outrage. Lots of media attention. Demands for results. The pressure on prosecutors is tremendous. And, sometimes, they can be so hyper-focused on the crime that they ignore the criminal. It’s almost like, if they can put someone in prison, the crime is ‘solved.’ It just . . . consumes them. Like going snow-blind.

“And it’s our—the public’s—fault, too. How do we judge prosecutors? On their conviction rates, right? So, if a DA has any sort of political ambitions, he’d better clear his cases. That’s where plea bargaining came from, originally. It is a bargain. The criminal gets a much lighter sentence, and the prosecutor doesn’t take a chance on losing a trial.”

“But why would an innocent person agree to a plea bargain?”

“They don’t,” I said, lighting another cigarette. I left it in the ashtray next to the candle-in-Chianti-bottle that had been burning since before I sat down. “And that’s where the gate to hell opens. That’s when the pressure builds to get a result. Any result. That’s when an innocent man goes to prison.”

“A man like—?”

“John Anson Wychek. You understand what they did to him, don’t you? I don’t mean the wrongful conviction,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her from speaking, “I mean the rest of it.”

“I know it ruined his—”

“Ms. Reinhardt . . .”

“Laura.”

“Laura, the fact that you couldn’t be closer to the situation and even you don’t understand the scope of the tragedy, well, that proves why my book has to be written. Look, your brother was convicted of a single crime, right?”

“Yes. They said he—”

“In fact,” I interrupted, “he was convicted of more than a dozen.”

“What? How can you—?”