interest.
“How?”
“He thinks he has a line on something Brightman did as a kid that will ruin his political career. I was with him in Jersey yesterday checking it out. That was no coincidence today that someone mentioned me getting the bump to second grade. You’re too smart a man not to see the connection.”
Larry got down to business. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Wit got a lead about some bombshell shit Brightman and this guy Jeffrey Anderson did as kids. We went to Jersey yesterday to talk to this Anderson, but he’s moved out to California somewhere. Wit’s flying to California tomorrow to look for this guy, and I’m going with him. I gotta keep an eye on him. Can you clear a few days for me, postpone my reinstatement for a while?”
“Don’t worry about it, but to tell you the truth, Moe, it sounds like you’re talking outta your ass. What could this guy possibly have on Brightman?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.” I stood to leave.
“Don’t you want your drink?”
“No time. Gotta go home and pack. I have a long trip ahead of me.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
Chapter Nineteen
The flight from La Guardia to O’Hare had been uneventful if not exactly enjoyable. Wit was a nervous flier and had trouble keeping still. The Wild Turkeys didn’t do anything but exacerbate his jitters, and frankly I was glad that we’d made the second legs of our journeys to separate locations. Actually, only one of us had taken that second flight. By the time Wit got to L.A., I was already in Miami.
Miami was a funny place. In some ways it was like the Catskills south. Once the hot vacation destination, it had fallen on hard times in the seventies. Unlike the Catskills, however, Miami was enjoying a renaissance of sorts, but not one built on art and enlightenment. No, the rebirth of Miami was driven by the ultimate cash crop of the decade, cocaine. Miami was the most desirable transshipment point for the bulk of cocaine smuggled into the States from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Florida’s seemingly endless coastline made it a smugglers’ paradise, as the coastline of Long Island had been a boon to bootleggers and rumrunners half a century before. But I wasn’t here about cocaine. I was here about another kind of smuggling, the human kind.
Barto had gotten a good head start and had a fair amount of information by the time I checked into my motel. He’d left a message for me at the front desk. It was dark here just as it would be back in New York, but the harbingers of autumn, the crispness in the night air and the hints of gold in the leaves, were absent. By the feel of the hot, damp night on the skin of my face, it might as well have been mid-July. The dankness that lurked in the peach and teal green corners of my cheap room did nothing to argue me out of the illusion of summer.
There was a knock at my door. It was Barto. During our previous two meetings, I hadn’t bothered taking much notice of him. Until yesterday, he’d been more of a what than a who. He was built like a fireplug, short and squatty. Gravity and years of eating bad food had given him a prominent gut. He had a chubby, almost boyish face. He’d also lost most of the hair on top of his head, though he hadn’t yet faced up to the fact. I’m certain Barto fancied himself quite the miracle worker with how he parlayed the few strands of top hair he had left into a sort of spiderweb covering his bald pate. He probably hadn’t seen himself on videotape recently. It was one thing to look in a mirror and fool yourself. It was something else to see yourself on film.
“You were right,” he said, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. “Spivack flew down here at least three times in the last year. I had some old contacts do a little checking. He spent most of his time in Little Havana, just like you predicted. You want a beer?” he asked, holding up the six-pack he held in his right hand.
“Sure.”
“It’s from some country in Central America, El Salvador or some shit,” he warned, twisting off two caps. “It’s yellow as cartoon piss, but it’s pretty good stuff. Here.”
“Don’t go into advertising, Ralph.”
Not understanding, he shrugged his shoulders. We drank in relative quiet.
“So, Joe was down here that much, huh? Three times.”
“At least,” Barto answered. “Maybe more. I can find out for sure if I go to the field office and have them check.”
“That won’t be necessary. How often’s not really that important. All I needed to know was that he was here. What about Alfonseca?”
That enthusiasm once again spread itself across Barto’s boyish face. “Ivan was one bad little puppy, even back in Cuba. He was in jail by the time he was eleven and came over when Fidel cleaned out his jail cells in the seventies. Florida’s still paying the price for that bullshit. Criminals are the one commodity we don’t need to import, but that didn’t stop his assholiness Jimmy Carter from taking the bastards in like they was fucking engineers and rocket scientists.”
“Maybe President Carter just wanted to keep the U.S. marshals busy.”
“Did he ever. We earned our pay down here, let me tell you.”
“But did Ivan and Spivack ever cross paths?”
“I won’t be able to tell you that until tomorrow or maybe the day after that.”
“And the middleman,” I wondered, “any luck there?”
“I got my feelers out on that. I got a friend or two still works down here. There’s plenty of ways to funnel money back to families left behind in Cuba, but a big amount like you’re talking requires someone with contacts inside the government there and the community here. Those kinda people don’t grow on trees, Mr. Prager. Little Havana’s bigger than it used to be, but it’s still a tight community. We’ll find the middleman.”
“Okay, Ralph, I’m pretty beat. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“You want another beer?”
“No thanks.
“Good night, Ralph.”
Rain was tap-tap-tapping on the glass-slat-and-aluminum windows when I got up the next morning. It was a gray tropical rain, heavy and fast with a sun chaser. I ate breakfast across the street from the motel in a waffle house. I was in the mood for a waffle. I hadn’t eaten one in years. But when I noticed that the waffle irons hadn’t been cleaned since the Bay of Pigs, I opted for eggs. There wasn’t anything for me to do now until I heard from Barto, so I asked the woman behind the counter where the closest car rental was. I had a friend who lived not too terribly far away, a friend I hadn’t seen in quite some time.
The ride up to Boca Raton was pleasant enough, and finding the Millennium Village retirement complex was easy. I’d asked directions at the supermarket when I stopped to buy a bottle of vodka and some pastries. The problem was, I hadn’t called ahead. I don’t know. I guess I really wanted to see the look on Israel Roth’s face when I strolled into his condo unannounced.
“Who’s there?” he screamed impatiently as I knocked at his door. “What, you trying to take the door off the hinges?”
I kept knocking. “Special delivery.”
“Stop already with the knocking. Nothing’s that special.” He flung back the door.
“Hey, Mr. Roth.”
“Mr. Moe!” He might have been in his seventies, but he hugged like a college wrestler.
“Izzy, you’re crushing the rugelach.”
“Come in. Come in.”
I put the goods down on the coffee table and gave him back a proper hug. He had reminded me of my father when we’d met two years before in the Catskills. Time had done little to change that, but I liked Israel Roth for who he was, not for who he wasn’t. We exchanged the expected small talk about his health and my family, carefully avoiding any discussion of the incident that had brought us together in the first place. He wanted to know if Katy
