Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

“How do you know this is Barry’s number?” I said.

“Hours of intensive sleuthing,” Sam said, “and then I called it and he answered.”

“What did he say?” I said.

“First, that he was happy to hear my voice. Second, that he was curious regarding Fiona’s current romantic status. And third, that he was scared to death of Junior Gonzalez,” Sam said.

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“I told him you’d call him, see if you could ease his beating heart a little bit.”

A common misconception about people on society’s fringe is that they have some indelible sum of street smarts that Joe Public does not. The truth is that you usually end up on society’s fringe because you lack a certain facility with the idea of cause and effect. Having street smarts really just means you don’t know how to exist in the real world where people are ruled by the idea that what they do will engender consequences.

That was Barry, in a nutshell.

“I’ll add that to my to-do list, right after saving Father Eduardo’s life,” I said. “What was he doing for Junior?”

“That’s what he wants to talk to you about,” Sam said. “He said it was just a consulting gig.”

“A consulting gig?”

“Ecomony’s tight, Mikey. Everyone’s taking on new job duties these days.”

“It’s true,” Fiona said. “I’m pondering a move into corporate sales and service. Like Blackwater, but with better outfits.”

Luckily, a hotel employee approached us before the conversation could continue between Sam and Fiona. He wasn’t young or hip enough to be one of the bar-tenders (all of whom wore tight black T-shirts and black pants trimmed in white, which made them look like lost, if fashionable, mimes), especially not with his gray hair, salt-and-pepper mustache and rather nervous demeanor. As he walked, he kept looking over his shoulder, as if he thought a tsunami was approaching, and even when he faced forward, his eyes continued to dart. His name tag said PABLO.

“Are you the people with the money?” Pablo asked.

“This your guy?” I asked Sam.

“No,” Sam said. “Where’s Louie?”

“On break,” Pablo said. “He sent me.”

“Why are you so nervous?” I asked.

“I need the money first,” Pablo said.

I pulled out my wallet and examined the contents. I only had about sixty dollars. That wasn’t much of a payoff, but I hadn’t hit the cash stash prior to our visit to the hotel. I handed Pablo the money, anyway, and waited while he counted the ones, fives and the lone twenty.

“This is only fifty-seven dollars,” he said. “My life is not worth only fifty-seven bucks.”

“That’s all I have,” I said.

“I’ll take your watch,” Pablo said.

“No, you won’t,” I said.

Pablo looked from me to Sam to Fiona. He lingered on Fiona for a moment too long.

“The leering you are doing would cost you fifty dollars at any reputable peep show,” Fiona said. “And if you stare a moment longer, it’s going to cost you your kneecaps.”

Pablo whipped his head back in my direction, which caused beads of sweat to fly from his scalp. It was nice outside, but not nice enough to make this man a sweaty mess.

“Your sunglasses,” he said to me. “Your sunglasses, and we’re even.”

When you’re a spy, you sometimes make sacrifices for the greater good. I could buy another pair of sunglasses, so I handed Pablo mine. He put them on immediately. They weren’t quite his look, but he seemed content. “Follow me,” he said. That he didn’t also say “if you want to live” was a great relief.

Work for the government long enough and what you realize is that there’s no such thing as absolute privacy. Every moment you spend holding your cell phone is a moment that can be tracked. Every Web site you visit on the Internet can be tracked. Every search you enter into Google can be tracked, so if you spend a lot of free time searching for ways to blow up airplanes, be aware that there’s someone who is now looking for reasons why you might want to blow up an airplane. Everything you do behind the privacy of your front door is really just a sham: If the government wants to know what you’re doing, they might need a warrant to kick down the door, but they rarely need anything more than a couple of keystrokes to get a great idea of what you’re plotting.

If you want even a modicum of privacy, stay in a hotel. The government can’t as easily bug a business as they can a person. And when you’re in a hotel, there are plenty of people willing to do your bidding, so that you may feel even more secure. Plus, the sheer amount of people who might stay in a room, in addition to the number of people who have access to a room, and the amount of government-mandated cleaning that goes on, makes a hotel a forensics nightmare for investigators. Too much opportunity for pollution equals reasonable doubt.

At a place like the Ace Hotel, where looking the other way is a selling point, you could probably do a whole lot of illegal things, provided you kept the right people paid and didn’t make too much noise. And even then, well, you’d probably be just fine.

The Ace Hotel was located just off Collins Avenue in South Beach, and the local lore was that it was once President Kennedy’s Miami getaway, a place he’d go to meet with Marilyn Monroe and the Mafia and probably Castro, too. It was a small hotel-only four stories-but it made up for its lack of size by offering fifteen two-bedroom villas that faced the Miami Beach canal. It was one of those great mysteries of tourism: Why spend thousands of dollars to sleep in a villa that was likely not as nice as your own home?

“It is that one,” Pablo said. We’d followed him out of the pool area and around the back of the hotel and through the (intentionally) overgrown botanical gardens, which subtly hid the villas from sight. Nothing says “privacy” quite like plants grown to twice their normal size. That and water features burbling away in some hidden crevice-boutique hotels are always big on hidden crevices that contain very small fountains-make celebrities and the very rich feel like they are one with nature.

“Which one?” Sam said.

Pablo pointed in the vague direction of a twelve-foot thrust of fountain grass. “There,” he said. He was still sweating profusely and my glasses kept sliding down his nose, so that he had to continually push them up. He turned to me and handed me a room key card. “Take this,” he said.

“One minute,” I said. He hadn’t said a word since we left the pool and had grown consistently more nervous as we walked, which made me think we were walking into an ambush. “What’s in the villa?”

“Bad men,” he said.

Fiona groaned in exasperation. She reached over and snatched my glasses off Pablo’s face and handed them back to me. They were a bit too damp for my taste. “Pablo,” she said, “I’m not as patient nor as willing to spend money on frivolous information as my two simian friends. So I’m going to need you to speak only in complete sentences now. I know you’re scared of something, but if you aren’t more forthcoming with information, you will actually have a reason to be scared, versus the normal, unfounded fears of your sex.”

“Uh, Fi,” I said, but she waved me off.

Pablo’s sweaty fear was now wide-eyed anguish, so that was a nice change. “The man who rents this room? He tells me not to come and clean. But you understand, if I do not clean the rooms, I can lose my job. They track our security cards, so they always know if we’ve gone in the rooms and villas, you see. So they know. And I cannot lose my job. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Fiona said. She put her hand on Pablo’s wrist. Very gentle. Very caring. She had that ability for kindness, too, but she could also snap his wrist if she decided she didn’t trust him. “Please, continue.”