O'Farrell's Law

pick them up?”

McMasters shook his head. “They’re not on the streets, won’t be, I guess, until they think the heat’s off. And we won’t, even then. Not for what happened with Billy.”

“What!”

McMasters frowned. “You think we’re going to arraign streetwise drug dealers on the word of an eight-year- old kid? Their lawyers would suck us up and blow us out in bubbles.”

“Then what the fuck was it all about?” O’Farrell exploded. “Why’d you have me drive Billy so far into the ground that he’ll need a psychiatrist, if it was all one great big waste of time!”

“It wasn’t a great big waste of time, Mr. O’Farrell,” the other man said calmly. “We didn’t know Portillo and Ibanez were operating. Now we do. And we know how they’re operating, which is something else we didn’t know. There’s a marker sheet on both of them and we wait and we watch. We watch until they try it again and this time we catch them, only we have more than the word of a kid who believes spacemen exist. We have the evidence of an equally streetwise, hairy-assed narcotics officer who won’t be sliced up like chopped liver in the witness box.”

“Bullshit!” O’Farrell said. “They won’t try a kid from Billy’s school again, if they’re as streetwise as you say. So what have they got? The choice of a hundred schools, all over the city. You got enough officers to stake out every likely school, for as long as it takes? Your way they could go on operating for months! Years!”

“What’s your way, Mr. O’Farrell?” McMasters asked. “Pick them up off the streets, when we do see them, or bust into wherever we find they’re living? Take them to some back lot and tell them they don’t deserve to live, which they don’t, and blow them away? Summary justice, quick and neat and tidy, no need to bother a judge or jury? That’s not the way justice works in this country, sir, irritating though it is sometimes.”

O’Farrell swallowed, gazing at the other man, any response jumbled and clouded in his mind like those children’s toys that instantly become an obliterating snowstorm by being turned upside down. Finding them and killing them had been exactly what he’d been thinking, what he still thought. Justice—the justice of courts and attorneys and measured argument—didn’t come into it, had no place. At last he said, “And so it goes on?”

“And so it goes on, although we try to stop as much as possible,” McMasters said. “And I agree; it’s not enough.”

There was no purpose in discussing the philosophy of drug prevention on the streets of Chicago and its suburbs, O’Farrell thought. He said, “Ellen’s clean, according to the drug tests. We got a copy today.”

“So did I,” McMasters confirmed. “I’m glad.”

O’Farrell came close to asking the man’s recommendation, for a child psychiatrist, but at the last moment recalled that he knew someone else far better qualified. When he telephoned, Lambert listened without interruption, promised to get back to him, and did so within the day. He would, he said, recommend a female over a male and the best in the area was Patricia Dwyer. She turned out to be a motherly, big-chested woman whose office was like the toy-cluttered interview room at the police station. From her fees O’Farrell decided she had to be the best, but she and Billy developed an immediate rapport, so O’Farrell judged whatever it cost to be worthwhile. Before Billy’s first session he and Ellen spent an hour with the woman, answering every question. On impulse, because she told them of frequent involvement in matrimonial cases, O’Farrell asked her to recommend a lawyer through whom he could pursue Patrick.

Steven Giles was a nervously thin, stripe-suited man with rimless spectacles and a marine haircut—although he hardly looked robust enough to have served. Giles was peremptory and impatiently aggressive, which O’Farrell decided might be a good attitude for them.

Halfway through their first interview Giles said to Ellen, “So your reason for working late sometimes was that Patrick repeatedly reneged on alimony and child support?”

“Yes,” Ellen said, subdued.

“What took you so long to try to get the payments made through the court? The system exists.”

“He kept promising,” Ellen said emptily.

Giles sighed. “That doesn’t say much about your judgment.”

“Not a lot does,” Ellen said, depressed into self-pity.

The attorney took Ellen through the details of her job, the hours worked, and her income and expenditures and then said, “You don’t live a life of luxury, do you?”

“I’m giving her an allowance,” O’Farrell said. “She’ll be able to manage all right if the alimony and child- support arrears are paid up and then maintained.”

Speaking directly to Ellen, Giles said, “I can do my part, and if the facts are as you’ve outlined them, I don’t see we’ve got a great problem. But you’ve got to help yourself more if you want to stay ahead in the future.”

“What do you mean?”

“The moment he tries to duck, you’ve got to tell me so I can go back through the courts,” the lawyer insisted. “And I mean duck on anything: if he misses more than one visit with Billy without a proper excuse, you tell me. Likewise if there’s any job change, I want to hear that, too.…” The man hesitated, looking briefly at O’Farrell. “Your father’s right. Patrick left you; he’s responsible for you. He doesn’t deserve any breaks.”

“I know,” Ellen said sadly.

“So stop being a wimp,” Giles said. “Start standing up for yourself. And for Billy.”

“Well! well! well!” McCarthy said, putting aside the documentation that had been collated. “Here’s some more ingredients for the pot. O’Farrell has got some personal involvement with drugs, through what’s happened to his grandson. And Jose Gaviria Rivera is an official delegate to a conference in Spain. What can we make out of that?”

Sneider said, “Spain could be an excellent opportunity. O’Farrell’s the one we can’t anticipate or second- guess.”

“Yet the one who’s got to do it,” McCarthy said. To the third man in the room, the Plans director said, “So could he be persuaded?”

“Providing the argument was carefully enough prepared, I think he could,” Lambert said.

McCarthy smiled at his deputy. “You still got the Makarevich file out of records?”

“Yes,” Sneider said.

“It could all come good,” McCarthy said, distantly. “Then let’s see what people say about Soviet freedom and glasnost and all that other shit.”

TWENTY-NINE

THE WARNING that something particularly important was arriving by diplomatic courier came in code through the intelligence service’s supposedly secure electronics link with Havana, so Rivera was prepared. And worried. It was a method that had never been used before—openly connecting him with the DGI—so the risk had to have been judged acceptable even if the communication channel wasn’t secure from the British after all. Very important, then. Well aware that speculation was fruitless, Rivera speculated anyway, convinced there could only be one thing to justify it. But what could have gone wrong! His excuse about the VAX—that highly classified, state-of-the-art technology would take much longer to obtain—had been accepted, and everything else had been supplied. There’d been congratulations, the promise of the unwanted promotion. Which left only the siphoned-off bank account. But it was impossible for that to have been discovered! Or was it? If Belac had bypassed him about the held-back payment and complained or sought settlement direct from Havana (Why in God’s name hadn’t he paid! Why had he been so greedy!) it would have been possible to locate it by working backward, from Belac’s Swiss account to the other account from which the earlier money had come.

The pendulum swung, from pessimism to optimism. So what? Because of the Swiss bank secrecy regulations, Havana could only have gotten, at best, an account number. No amount. No evidence of what he’d been doing. And he would have known if Belac had approached Havana, Rivera reasoned. Havana didn’t know Belac was the supplier: Rivera’s refusal to disclose his or any other arms dealer’s identity had been essential to his remaining the indispensable intermediary. If Belac, someone completely unknown to Havana, managed somehow to penetrate the governmental layers demanding money, Rivera would receive a