“Mikey, she can be very persuasive.”
Since returning to Miami, my mother, Madeline, has inserted herself into all of my deepest-and most mundane-relationships. It’s as if all the attention she didn’t give me or Nate as kids she’s trying to make up for now, which is a nice sentiment, if not a completely exciting thing to actually live with. “Attention” for my mother often means me coming to her house and repairing the toaster oven or the top-loading VCR.
Anyway, my mother’s call reminded me of something important. “Anything on his sick mother?”
Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper that had his scribbles on it. “Bruce’s release address is registered to Zadie Grossman, age eighty-eight. I’m going to guess that’s not his hot young wife.”
He handed me the paper. It was an address in Aventura, a section of North Miami known for its extensive Jewish community, notably a large senior citizen population. Not exactly the kind of locale one wants to find themselves in after doing more than a decade of hard time, but then maybe he missed his mother’s cooking.
Still, there was something interesting about this. I owed Barry a favor or two hundred, but I had to think that a sixty-five-year-old man, ex-felon or not, living with his mother meant something.
If you really want to know about somebody, meet them when they are around their parents. When you’re a spy, this isn’t something that happens very often. You walk into the Libyan Embassy in Qatar and ask for Salim and Salim’s mommy, the odds are you’re not going to get either of them. But follow Salim for a few weeks and you’ll see how often he eats at his mother’s house, how often he complains to his wife that she doesn’t make Sharba Libiya as well as his mother does, how often he calls his mother to just check in, make sure everything is okay, and how little regard he gives to his wife’s welfare, you know you’ve got someone you can manipulate.
Or at least someone who isn’t going to stray too far, lest his mommy needs him.
I needed to get out of Miami.
I flipped through the file and came up with several photos of a house. The address matched the one Sam gave me.
“Why is the FBI still watching him?” I asked.
“The FBI doesn’t watch people, Michael, you know that.” Sam reached across the table and took the file from me and fished around for a few moments and then pulled out a photo of an older gentleman wearing a red V-neck sweater, tan pants and red loafers. He carried a black satchel in his hands. “This is what Mr. Grossman looks like now.”
“Looks like time did him,” I said. There were lines around his eyes that brought to mind the inside of trees. The weird thing was that he was missing most of the pinkie on his right hand. “What happened to his hand?”
“Belt-sanding accident inside,” Sam said.
“What kind of accident?”
“Someone tried to take off his face with a belt sander, got his finger instead.”
“They keep him separate from the population after that?”
“Doesn’t seem like it. Records show he was in general population the whole time,” Sam said. “So, doesn’t look like he snitched.”
“There goes your rehabilitation angle,” I said, though the truth is that if you’re in prison, it’s probably better for your long-term mortality to not snitch.
“Hey, maybe he had a revelation upon release,” Sam said. He had a point, though not much of one. “Any guesses on what’s in that satchel?”
“Girl Scout cookies,” I said.
“Guess again.”
“A chisel and hammer.”
“One more,” he said.
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“You’re not fun to play games with,” Sam said. “Anyway”-he was excited now, which was obvious since he stopped drinking the multiple beers he’d been nursing since we sat down and was now just toying with a knife-“that satchel contains the current membership list of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club. Your friend Mr. Grossman is in the process of surreptitiously dropping it off in front of the FBI field office on Northwest Second.”
“Why would he have…” I began, but then stopped. “They’re not watching him, are they? They’re protecting him.”
“Not quite,” Sam said. “They’re just curious how an ex-con living with his mommy happened to run across this information and then felt compelled to drop it on their doorstep. Especially since he could have just as easily dropped it with some members of the Banshees and solved a lot of problems.”
The Ghouls and the Banshees were the biker gang equivalent of a family feud gone wrong. The Banshees splintered from the Ghouls a decade ago, and the resulting war between the two groups was one of those organized-crime wars that the authorities were usually happy to let happen; as long as they just killed one another, there was a net gain for society.
“He had to know there were cameras,” I said, which made me realize: He had to know there were cameras. And there it was. The extenuating circumstance Barry mentioned. The stash house belonged to the Ghouls Motorcycle Club, an outlaw gang whose propensity for violent crime made even the Hells Angels seem like an esteemed group of kind and generous fellows with a shared interest in motorcycles. If he was dropping off their materials at the FBI office in broad daylight, and in a bright red sweater no less, that meant he was scared.
I came back to the photos of the house in Aventura. From the outside it looked like a standing set from Miami Vice: the facade was faux Art Deco and statues of pink flamingos dotted the lawn. In the driveway, however, was a yellow Ford Fairmont station wagon, replete with wood paneling and a luggage rack.
“How sick is the mother?” I asked.
“Gets radiation five days a week,” Sam said. “Maxed credit cards. Looks like Medicare is picking up some of the rudimentary stuff, but I guess cancer isn’t all that rudimentary.”
I thought about my mother, who smoked like Chernobyl but miraculously didn’t have cancer. Meeting Bruce’s mother might be a nice object lesson. Or it might just give her someone to smoke with. “Is she dying?”
“Old people die,” Sam said. “Old people with cancer don’t have improved odds, they just die more painfully.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Why should I take this job?”
“All the people you’ve ever helped, you think he’s half as bad as most?”
“He’s a bank robber,” I said.
“So is Fiona,” Sam said. “And for a terrorist organization, I might add.”
“That’s not been substantiated,” I said. “There’s some muddy area concerning whether or not she knew she was working for the IRA.”
“She also sells guns to criminals,” Sam said. “As in she had me watch her back yesterday while you were meeting with Barry. Sold a trunkful of Russian GSh-18 pistols to some Cubans.”
“Cubans?”
“Planning a revolution or something. Real beauties. Anyway, I admit that when Fiona does a little crime, it’s hot, real hot, but you can’t pick and choose your bad guys. Plus, while Fiona probably wouldn’t smother her dying mother, she’s not known for her Florence Nightingale tendencies, Mikey. At least Grossman is doing all he can to save his mother. Or at least make her comfortable.”
When Sam is the voice of reason, I know there’s something fundamentally wrong. But then he added, “And you owe Barry, Mikey.”
Again with the voice of reason…
I took out my cell and called Barry.
“I’ll meet with Grossman on one condition,” I said. “I take this, I need some cash, you pay my fee. I don’t want whatever money he’s holding on to.”
“That makes me think you don’t trust him,” Barry said.
“I don’t,” I said.
“You realize I don’t work nights at a Christian charity, right?”
“Your stolen money is cleaner,” I said.
“That’s kind.”
“I also know where you live.”
There was a pause on the line. “You do?” he said finally.
“Tell Grossman I’ll be at his house in two hours,” I said and hung up. Best to leave some questions unanswered.