“Today.”
He nodded. “Today.”
“Did the birdwatcher say anything else?”
“He’s a little annoyed. He said if this guy’s so important, how come nobody told the FBI to send the first team.”
“Good question.”
“I thought it was implied in what I told them, but he said they acted like we were after an eight-o-niner.”
“What’s that?”
“I was afraid I was the only one who didn’t know. It’s what he calls a person carrying money out of the country for illegal purposes. They’re not usually dangerous.”
“What’s eight-o-nine, an IRS regulation?”
“No. It’s a telephone area code. Cayman Islands, Dutch Antilles …”
“I’ll remember that. It’s probably where all the HUD money went.” She turned and walked over to her old desk to get her purse. As she picked it up, she tried to remember whether she had left anything in the conference room. No. She could feel her pen, wallet, keys and glasses through the soft glove leather. It was going to be all right. She could be in her office in the other building in time for work, and none of this would have to take up space in her mind. Then she realized that Richardson had followed her out. In a way it was an appropriate gesture. She had given up several hours of her time to a division she didn’t work for, and somehow the fiction had been allowed to grow between them that they had been friends in the old days, so for the moment it was good to maintain the pretense long enough for her to get out of here gracefully. The truth was that when she had left the section ten years ago, she had officially gone on vacation and then never come back. She’d had no impulse to say good-bye to anyone at the time, and when it had occurred to her that she should have, it was too late. Nobody in the office had called her, either.
“Elizabeth,” Richardson said. He was going to thank her for the favor. Fine, she thought. She’d say it was nothing, and then she would be out of here.
But he said, “I’ve got a favor to ask.”
Carlo Balacontano had been playing gin rummy since he was twelve, and he was very good at it. In October he would be sixty-six, and it was one of the things he could still do as well as he ever had, because even though his arms were no longer heavily muscled and his knees were sometimes a little stiff, his mind was still able to determine and remember the locations of all fifty-two cards, if a game came down to that. Usually he needed to hold only about thirty in his head at once, and he could do that, talk and think about business at the same time. But today he wasn’t doing any of that, because he was sitting across the weight-lifting table from José-Luc Ospina.
Every day Carl Bala came to sit under the overhanging roof of the weight-training area. When he approached in his slow, leisurely stroll, four young men would step up and begin to haul the barbells off the leather-bound table so that he could sit down, take his deck of cards out of the breast pocket of his blue-denim shirt and rip open the package. This ritual had gone on since his second month at Lompoc Federal Correctional Facility eight years ago.
He would have begun to play gin right away, but for the first four weeks he had been out of his mind. His lawyers had assured him right up until the last day that his case would be retried in the Court of Appeals. But the judge had read the trial transcript in one afternoon, then ruled that there were no grounds for appeal. This had somehow stuck with him during the next few weeks, tormenting him, awake or asleep. Carl Bala was not a no-neck whose reading speed was determined by how fast he could move his lips, but he simply did not believe that anyone could read twelve hundred pages of testimony in one afternoon. He suspected that the pompous little bastard was one of those people who had gone to a class where they learned to read by moving their index fingers down the center of the page. The fact that after all these years he had finally been convicted on a bogus charge had not struck him as outrageous. With few exceptions, the people he knew who had gone to jail had been guilty, but not necessarily guilty of the particular crimes discussed at their trials. The system knew its enemies. If he’d had the choice of either accepting the simple murder of Arthur Fieldston or confessing to all the things he had actually done, he would have chosen Fieldston.
These days, the irritant that made Carlo angry most frequently was the existence of José Ospina. Four years ago on a summer afternoon Balacontano had arrived at the weight table to see the usual gaggle of prisoners wearing the thick leather belts cinched around their middles to keep their guts from popping out, straining to raise the heavy weights above their heads and curling the small barbells to make their already-bulging forearms look like ham hocks. He had sat down at the table, pulled the little red string to open the cellophane on his new deck of cards, removed the jokers and begun to shuffle. Then he had looked up to see a tall, dark young man with curly black hair and eyes like a cat sit down across from him. The man had his shirt cut off at the sleeves to reveal bony arms decorated with strange greenish tattoos. They were pictures of some sort of vegetation. They didn’t look like natural plants; they seemed almost architectural. Most maddening of all, they looked familiar. Carlo Balacontano didn’t recognize the tattoos until José Ospina had set his cards down on the table and whispered, “Gin.” Then he had taken off his shirt and Bala had found himself staring at the face of Benjamin Franklin. The tattoos were the flourishes and scrollwork engraved on a hundred-dollar bill.
From that day onward, José Ospina proceeded to ruin Carl Bala’s life. Carl Bala was rich: even now in New York there were large, quiet men who spent all their time driving big, heavy cars to various places of commerce to collect his rake-offs, percentages and tributes. He was also famous, in the way that mattered. Even here, three thousand miles and eight years away from the scenes of his triumphs, he could have walked into a hotel on the shore of the Pacific and taken the best suite in the place on the strength of his name. But that was in the outside world, and Carl Bala wasn’t living in the world. He was in a small, sun-bleached federal prison twenty miles into the dry yellow countryside of central California, hedged between jagged, impassable stone mountains that rose abruptly from the valley floor to the east and broad, open lowlards that stretched to the sea on the west; twenty miles of sparse, ankle-high weeds with every mile or so a crabbed, tortured live oak tree ro more than eight feet tall to provide the only shade.
In this place, meeting José Ospina was like watching a cockroach scurrying off his dinner plate. At first he had been a shock, but Carl Bala had tried to reconcile himself to it. Then, day after day, he had sat and felt the sting as the young man, looking a little bored, had set his cards on the weight table before him and said in his soft voice, “Gin.” Even worse, there were times when José Ospina would watch Balacontano discard once, then pick up his cards, fan them out, close the fan and say, “I’ll knock with ten.” Or eight or three. And Carlo would be frantically leafing through his brand-new hand, staring at the face cards, aces and tens he hadn’t had time to count up, let alone unload.
Stacked decks Carl Bala could have understood, but these things happened when José Ospina hadn’t so much as cut the cards. Palming and substituting a whole hand was not unheard of on the planet Earth, but José Ospina always played with the sleeves cut off his shirt, the flourishes of scrollwork copied from the currency of the United States visible running up his bare arms. He had no place to hide extra cards, no way of cheating at all. José Ospina was lucky. Admittedly he was a pitiless, competitive, supernaturally alert gin player, but the immutable forces of probability and chance simply kissed him on the forehead and passed by him each day to settle with their customary ferocity on the shoulders of Carl Bala. Bala found himself living in this little penal outpost where the only pleasure permitted him was winning at gin, something that happened so seldom now that when it did it felt like mockery.