Tod Goldberg: The Reformed

There were seven buildings in all and each was a modern steel-and-glass structure, even the church. There wasn’t a spot of graffiti anywhere, nor was there any visible security. The adults and kids who sat on the grass and walked between the buildings looked tough from afar, which is to say that they looked like they thought they looked tough, but really just looked like they’d been terribly misguided at some point. Who walks with a limp when they don’t need to?

For the most part, however, everyone wore clothes that fit and most of the men, women, girls and boys wore identical gray polo shirts with the logo for Honrado Incorporated on the left breast pocket. If you want to build an army, the first thing you need to do is get them into uniform. This is true if you’re in the marines or if you’re in the Bloods. People like to feel like they belong to something larger than themselves, and even here, at a business run by a church, those rules still applied.

“What was this place before it was this?” I asked.

Sam looked around. “Nothing. That would be my guess.”

“Five acres of nothing?”

“Sure wasn’t a great, big park with Adirondack chairs.”

“No,” I said, “I would have remembered that.”

“Seems to me I remember parking here before football games. It was one of those vacant blacktop lots that some industrious soul decided to sit in front of with a sign offering parking for five bucks less than at the stadium.”

“This couldn’t have been cheap to renovate,” I said.

We made our way across the lawn to the church’s administrative offices. Double doors opened into a rounded portico where a young woman with a headset on sat behind a small desk. Unlike the young women who had the same job at the hotels along South Beach or the busy offices in Coconut Grove, this woman had a ragged scar that stretched from the corner of her right eye, crossed over her nose and continued all the way over her left cheek and down across her jawline. It was rippled and red and maybe half an inch wide. It was unmistakable: Someone had slashed her face with a razor blade.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“We’re here to see Eduardo,” I stopped myself, considered the surroundings, and then corrected, “Father Eduardo.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No,” I said, “but he’s expecting me. Tell him his friend from the car wash is here.”

The girl touched her ear and spoke into the headset. “Father Santiago? Your friend from the car wash is here. Would you like me to take them to the conference room? Yes, no problem, Father.” The girl tapped her ear again and smiled up at us. “Father Santiago is running a few minutes behind schedule. He says he’ll be right out to see you in a moment. Can I get you something to drink while you wait?”

“What do you have in a bottle?” Sam asked.

“Evian or Dasani,” she said.

“He’ll have Evian,” I said before Sam could answer.

“No problem,” she said. She slid a clipboard toward me and asked me to sign in, which I did. Except that I said my name was Napoleon Solo, because I thought it prudent not to have my name on the official visitor’s list of any organization. I handed the clipboard to Sam. He signed it Illya Kuryakin and handed it back to the girl, who then proceeded to not even bother to look at it, which Sam clearly viewed as a shame. The girl then got up and walked down the narrow hall to her left, and I saw that her scar actually stretched around her neck, too.

Sam and I sat down in the lobby, and a few moments later, the girl returned with our waters.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

Immediately, the girl’s hand flared up toward the scar on her face. “Sure,” she said, though I could tell she felt uneasy. “I get asked questions all the time.”

“Do you like working here?” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Do you like your job here? Has it been good for you to work here?”

“Working for Father Santiago is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” she said.

I looked at Sam to see if he was gloating, but he was too busy trying to figure out the twist top of his water.

“How long have you been here?”

“A year. Maybe a little more. Soon as I got out, Father Santiago told me I could work for him.”

Got out. So comfortable telling a stranger she’d done time. “Where were you?”

“Homestead,” she said. “You ever been there?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s south of here. It wasn’t so bad. You know. It was actually safer for me. Crazy, right?”

“Crazy,” I said. “How old are you?”

“You don’t ask a lady that,” Sam said, which made the girl smile. “You ask how young they are, right?”

“Twenty-three,” she said. “But I feel older.”

“You look like a million bucks,” Sam said.

The girl touched her scar. She was pretty, you could see that, even with the gouge across her face and neck. “Father Santiago says that I could get plastic surgery for this. What do you think?”

“You could,” I said. I pointed at the scar under my left eye. “I was going to get this fixed, but I decided it gave me character. Something to talk about on dates. Sam, you have any scars?”

“Let me tell you about scars,” Sam said, and then proceeded to regale the girl with stories about the myriad holes and punctures and cuts that littered his body, each one another battlefield somewhere. I got the sense that the girl didn’t believe a word he was saying-when he brought up that shrapnel wound from the Falklands, I actually heard her sigh with something near to resignation-but the sad fact is that I don’t think he made anything up. “All of which is to say,” Sam continued, “it’s all about quality of life. If you think you’ll have a better life without that scar, then I say do yourself a favor, sister, and get it taken care of.”

“I will, then,” she said. “Father Santiago says he’s going to get a friend to help pay for it.”

“He have a lot of friends?” I asked.

“Don’t you read the newspaper?” she asked.

Before I could answer again, that no, I didn’t read the newspaper, Eduardo Santiago emerged from a conference room with his arm over a man’s shoulder. The man wore a beautifully tailored charcoal gray suit, a crisp white shirt and a silver tie. On his feet were wing-tips shined to a glow, on his wrist was an understated gold watch with a black face and on his head was a perfectly combed field of salt-and-pepper hair.

He looked like somebody. He looked like a Somebody. But then so did Eduardo in his navy blue suit and tan shirt opened at the collar, enough so that you could still make out the tattoos crawling up from his chest.

“Who is that with Eduardo?” I asked Sam.

“The mayor,” Sam said.

“Of where?”

“Miami,” Sam said.

Eduardo and the mayor shook hands, laughed about something, shook hands again and then the mayor said, as he walked toward us, “And remember to let me know when I can get you stuck in that sand trap again, Father!”

Sam stood up when the mayor was just a few feet away. “Mr. Mayor,” he said, and gave the politician a dignified nod of his head.

The mayor had a flicker of recognition when he saw Sam. And it wasn’t a flicker that screamed with joy. “Mr. Axe,” he said, and nodded right back at Sam, but also quickened his step out the door.

I looked at Sam. “You know the mayor of Miami?”

“I knew his wife,” he said.

“A buddy of yours?”

“Of a kind, yes.”

When you’re a spy, there’s no such thing as too much information. When you’re someone’s friend, the same rules do not apply.