Extraordinary Rendition (25 page)

Trying to smile, Christina sipped cold water from a plastic, brown-hued glass. “And so did he give you a million dollars?”

“Fifty-two million.”

“Say that again, Byron,” she said, “it’s a little too noisy in here.”

“Fifty-two. Actually, a little bit more.”

She blessed him with one of her smiles. At that moment, he was startled, as he often was, by how beautiful she was and how much he loved her.

“Is this a joke?”

“No, that’s what he said.”

“What did you do?”

“I have only three banks where I keep accounts. I called them. It turns out there are people I’ve never heard of called relationship managers. My calls got routed to them. I never spoke to any of them before. I never knew I needed a relationship manager.”

She paused as a waiter in a white shirt, open at the neck, deftly poured coffee for them. “That must have been awkward,”
she said. “What did you ask: ‘Do I have fifty-two million dollars in my account today? I have some cell phone bills I need to pay.’”

“In all three cases, I was told the accounts had been closed, frozen. Late yesterday. When I asked why, they said I would have to talk to the bank’s lawyers. I did. Each of them said the banks had been served with forfeiture orders.”

She looked bewildered and concerned. “Forfeiture orders?”

“The accounts were seized. When I asked to see the orders they said they no longer had them. They said agents showed them the orders, waited as they read them, and wouldn’t let them make copies. Once they saw the orders they closed down the accounts.”

“Did fifty-two million dollars go into one of the accounts?”

“They refused to let me know that.”

She leaned forward. Her face was grave. “Carlos, what’s going on?”

Voices and the laughter of the young swept the room. These were happy kids, he thought, remembering the austere dining halls of his years as a student at Groton and Princeton. Nothing but men, all in ties, button-down Brooks Brothers shirts, and blue blazers. Everything orderly, subdued, cowed. No gay boys (at least none who acknowledged it), two blacks, few Jews. This was so different. It was so much more vital and vibrant and happy.

“There was once an expression I never used when I was in college, but I think about now.
They’re fucking with my head
.”

“We still use that, Carlos. It transcends generations.” She paused, sipping more water. He detected an ever-so-slight
tremor in her hand. “You need help. You need a lawyer of your own, don’t you think? You’re in a labyrinth. Everything is twisted. You stay on straight paths. Those straight paths are leading to walls and no exits. You’re hitting walls. You need to adapt. You need a guide.”

“You mean as in Virgil and Dante?

“Don’t joke, Carlos. You’re way too cool for your own good.”

Byron reached out for her hand. He held it. “You’re wrong. I’m scared out of my wits, Christina. Don’t you think I understand that I was in a world, just six months ago, in which I was denied nothing, as untouchable as Prince Valiant? Now I wake up every morning in stark raving dread.”

She looked straight into his eyes. He thought about the many times he was so close to her face as they made love that he could see in her brown eyes the reflection of his own.

“Is that why you’re up at five?”

“If I try to stay in bed, as I did for years knowing I’d drift back to sleep for another peaceful whole hour or so, I get racing, bad thoughts about my future. I get up now as quickly as I can, believing that being awake will ease the fears.”

Again, she tried to drink water but only wet her lips. “What fears, Carlos? Talk to me.”

“Such as losing everything I have.”

“What else?”

“Having yet another hateful news story about me show up in the
Post
and then instantly get etched forever in that great tablet for all ages, the Internet.”

“Tell me more.”

He hesitated. When he touched the cup of lukewarm coffee, his thumb was shaking. He doubted he could lift the heavy
ceramic cup without that shaking becoming obvious to her. He didn’t want to let Christina see that. He knew that at this stage in his life, and with this woman, it was pointless to hide his weaknesses. But he still lived by the aristocratic instincts for privacy and surface calmness his father had instilled in him.
Hold it together, son. Hold it together
. It was as though his father, in those few times in Byron’s childhood and teenage years when they were actually together, had decided to communicate advice to him derived from the cold-water, bracing ethics of English boarding schools in the nineteenth century. Maybe it was that reserve that had enabled his father to compose thoughtful, perfectly grammatical orders for murder.

Byron was in free-fall, and knew it. He said, “Sure, there is more, Christina. How about being indicted? These visits from Nashatka aren’t background checks for my Supreme Court nomination. They’re meant to unsettle me, in fact to scare the shit out of me.” He smiled. “And you know what? They’re working. I’ve got the message.”

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

“Wrong? I don’t think so. I’ve thought for years that a sense of realism was one of my most useful personal assets.
This is what is
. I built a career out of that one sentence, clients came to me because I had the capacity—at least they and I thought I had it—to see reality. Now very little in the world I live in seems real, but I’ve got enough connection still to that lifelong sense of reality to recognize what all the signs around me mean.”

The same waiter stood near them, raising a glass carafe of steaming coffee, the silent gesture asking, “More?”

“No thanks,” Byron said. “Do you want more, sweetie?”

She shook her head.

Byron said, “Check, please, sir.”

The hairy-chested Greek waiter took the check out of his shirt pocket and set it upright on the table between a salt shaker and a slender glass vase containing three plastic roses.

She took her scarf from the back of her chair and gracefully draped it over her shoulders. “Look at me, Carlos. In the face.”

He did.

“How can I help you?”

His words surprised him, but not her. “Stay with me.”

T
HE TILED WALLS OF the Astor Place subway station were decorated with murals depicting beavers. Astor Place was named for John Jacob Astor, who had built his early fortune on the trapping of beavers and other wildlife, making an industry out of the sale of animal furs. These murals, Byron thought as he walked over the platform toward the turnstiles, commemorated the slaughter of millions of innocent animals, and now they looked like cute pictures in a children’s book. Not the first time, Byron thought, that systematic slaughter had over time become trivialized. Once beyond the turnstile, he trotted up the worn iron steps that led to the wide Astor Place plaza.

He came to street level facing the Cooper Union building. Built with brownstone in the early nineteenth century, it was the place where Abraham Lincoln delivered his anti-slavery speech before he became president. The stone looked porous. A new, all-glass building, itself constructed with cube-shaped walls, stood at the far side of Astor Place on a space long occupied by an outdoor parking lot. On the streets around Byron were hundreds of young people moving quickly in the brisk late autumn air.

Byron walked south on Lafayette Street, passing the Public Theatre building. Long pennants were suspended from the upper floor of the building. One advertised
The Merchant of Venice
. Two stories high, the pennant bore a sketch of the
familiar, now aging face of Al Pacino. Years earlier, in the mid-seventies, Byron had brought a date to the Public Theater to see Raul Julia—dynamic, bold-eyed, young—play Macbeth. Joseph Papp was in the small audience, near the stage, as was Al Pacino. Papp’s frizzy hair, shaped in an Afro, glowed in the theater lighting. Byron could remember Raul Julia, Joseph Papp, and Al Pacino from that night, but he could not remember the woman he’d brought with him. He did recall crossing Lafayette Street with her after the play, going into the Colonnade Building and having dinner in a restaurant known as Lady Astor. It had a dark and seductive bar and wall coverings that were really velvet theater curtains; they were blood-red and a little frayed. The waiters were aspiring actors. It was one of the few times in his life that Byron got drunk. He remembered the glow of innumerable bottles behind the bar and the reflection of his own handsome face in the mirror behind the rows of bottles.

Now there was a Thai restaurant, Boontang, in the space where Lady Astor had been. The tall windows between the Doric columns of the Colonnade Building were filled with bamboo trees, not the velvet curtains of the long-closed Lady Astor.

Fifteen minutes later, after a fast walk along Eighth Street to the West Village, he entered the quiet precincts of Waverly Place. He pressed the grimy buzzer to Simeon Black’s apartment. At the same time, he pushed open the lobby door. The buzzer sounded, but the lock had stopped working years ago. He stepped quickly up the one flight of stairs and opened the door to the apartment.

Early in his relationship with Simeon Black he had decided to just let go of what he knew. He felt that if he shared
the information he had with another person, and broke his isolation, he might find some protection in that. He had restrained himself from telling Christina everything. He loved her, he admired her maturity and intelligence (and took delicious pleasure in her body and her presence), but something in his breeding or character or experience in life made him resist the temptation to tell her all he had learned about Ali Hussein, his heavy-faced and heavy-set brother, the judge, the prosecutors, the Imam in the mosque on Raymond Boulevard in Newark, and the passages from the
Koran
. She appeared to find it all exciting, but there were limits to what he wanted to share with her.

Not so with Simeon Black. Byron continued to believe, despite what he had learned about the unpredictability of journalists, that providing Simeon with what he had learned over the last six months gave him some protection in a world he knew was increasingly treating him as some bizarre outcast, a man who had been hijacked by some defect of his own character or by a misguided, or even demented, sense of justice. If he gave Simeon Black the truth, then there might be a credible person to bear witness for him. And so far, the drafts he’d seen of the article Simeon was writing gave Byron confirmation of his own hope. Simeon’s working title was
America at War with Itself
.

“Holy shit,” Simeon said, smiling, after hearing Byron tell him about the wire transfers, “it’s like missing the winning lottery by one number.”

“Imagine what we could have done with it. We could have lived out that scene at the end of
Casablanca
where Rick and Captain Reynaud walk into the desert and look forward to a beautiful friendship.”

Smiling, Simeon drew one of his unfiltered Gauloises out of its blue cellophane package. After lighting it, he snapped the match downward once and the flame went out.

“Sy, how many of those do you think you’ve had over the years?”

“Probably fifty-two million dollars’ worth.”

“We could be rich.”

“Who did you say this agent is?”

“He pronounces it Na-Shat-Ka. He didn’t spell it for me, I didn’t ask. He tried to hand me his card. I didn’t take it.”

“Was it Jesse Ventura?”

Byron laughed. “Who’s on first? Who’s on third? No, it wasn’t Jesse. This one was younger. But the same type of presence, only younger. The spawn of the devil.”

Simeon Black was not as open with Byron as Byron was with him. He needed information from Byron, not Byron’s protection. “I had a friend take some pictures of Jesse Ventura this week,” he said. He didn’t use the name Andrew Hurd.

Intrigued, Byron looked directly at Simeon, who turned the computer screen in his direction. The screen filled with a tableau of ten pictures. In that array—five on top, five under them—not one of the pictures was large enough to be seen clearly. Simeon clicked the trackball on the computer, and the first picture came forward enlarged, filling the screen.

It was Jesse Ventura. “Look at the devil,” Byron said, whistling between his teeth.

“Do you see who he’s with?”

In the picture, Jesse Ventura was opening the door to a modern office building, so much like the entrance to the Seagram Building that Byron searched the background of the
picture to find any familiar object or sign. There was nothing definitive.

“Who is it?” Byron asked.

“Don’t you watch TV?”

“No, it’s on all the time but I don’t watch. I worry I’ll see myself. Complete with a turban and the dangling wires of a homemade bomb. House counsel to al-Qaeda.”

“It’s interesting, the company Jesse keeps. The blonde is a television star. She’s created an aura for herself as an anti-Muslim prophet. She’s also a professor of Islamic studies at Stanford.”

“Maybe Jesse Ventura has charms we can only guess at.”

Simeon passed through six more pictures. On the miraculous computer, they began as tiny images and instantly came forward with absolute clarity as they filled the screen.