Daniel Blake - City of Sins

All men, Patrese noticed, and all white. The absolute top jobs – mayor, DA, police chief, pretty much everyone bar Phelps himself – might have had black incumbents, but to Patrese the dark crust seemed very thin, like a pint of Guinness in negative.

‘And this,’ said Phelps, his voice rising slightly as though in anticipation of a drum roll, ‘is Cindy Rojciewicz.’

Patrese knew she’d be a knockout even before she turned, just from the reactions of everyone around them. It was like something from the Discovery Channel: the males puffing their chests out, the females bristling and snarling with affront.

‘Hiii,’ said Cindy, in a voice which suggested she’d spent more time than was healthy smoking filterless cigarettes and watching Marlene Dietrich films. ‘Wyndham’s told me a whole heap about you.’ She winked. ‘All good, of course.’

Such an obvious lie, Patrese thought. Why then was he so flattered?

Raven hair, cobalt eyes and a dress which straddled demonstrative and slutty might have had something to do with it, he conceded.

With every wife in a five-yard radius practically dragging their husbands away by the hair, and Phelps excusing himself with a pat on Patrese’s shoulder – he could hardly have made it more obvious if he’d winked and given a thumbs-up – Patrese suddenly found himself alone with Cindy.

She nodded toward his shirt. ‘Spill something?’

‘Sort of.’

‘You wanna come inside and freshen up?’

‘Come inside? You live here?’

She laughed. ‘I wish. I’m Mr Varden’s PA. I know my way around.’

‘And he won’t mind?’

‘Jeez, Franco; it’s a house, not a darn museum.’ Houshe, musheum; she was drunk, Patrese realized.

Drunk, sexy as hell, and inviting him inside. A good Catholic boy might have made his excuses. A lapsed Catholic, never.

‘Then let’s go,’ he said.

She walked a pace in front of him. He kept his eyes above her waist for at least a second. A triumph of willpower, in the circumstances.

They dodged a couple of waiters and went in through a pair of French doors. It was much darker now they were out of the sun, and Patrese blinked twice as his eyes adjusted. Cooler, too. He gave a little shiver as the sweat began to dry.

Cindy was holding a door open. ‘Over here.’

He caught a tendril of her scent as he walked past. It was a library, air heavy with leather and walls paneled with wood the color of toast.

She closed the door behind her.

‘You can freshen up in a second, Franco. But first, I want to …’

He was already moving for the kiss as he turned back to her.

‘…say there’s something terrible going on,’ she blurted.

Their lips had almost touched before he realized what she’d said. He pulled back and looked at her, almost too startled to be embarrassed.

‘I need to tell someone about it,’ she said. ‘I need to tell you.’

‘But you’ve never even met me.’

‘Exactly. Exactly. Everyone here knows everyone. Tell one of them, you tell the whole lot. Might as well take out a personal in the Times-Picayune, you know? But not you. You don’t know anyone here, not properly. Not yet. You’re not –’ she grabbed for the word, missed, found it with a snap – ‘tainted.’

Cindy was talking fast but coherently; the strange lucidity of the drunk whose brain can only focus on one thing at a time, but does so with the precision of a laser.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Then tell me. What is it?’

‘Too big to tell you now. Too complicated.’

‘Just give me an idea.’

‘Oh, God … Sacrifice.’

‘Sacrifice?’

‘Sacrificing people.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got documents. Evidence. I need you alone, not with’ – she waved an arm vaguely toward the window – ‘all that boo-yah going on out there. And I need to trust you. Maybe I won’t, next time. Maybe I’ll have got you all wrong.’

‘But you’ve just told me …’

‘I’ve told you nothing. Not yet.’

A shadow fell across the strip of light at the bottom of the door. Patrese and Cindy watched it pause a moment, then disappear.

‘So,’ she said, ‘you interested?’

‘I told you already. Yes.’

‘Good. Can’t meet tomorrow – we’re out of town all day.’

‘We?’

‘Mr Varden and me. Wherever he goes, I go. You free Wednesday? After work?’

‘Sure.’

‘You know Checkpoint Charlie’s?’

‘Esplanade and Decatur, right?’

‘A man who knows his bars. Always a good sign. Eight o’clock? Don’t get out of work much earlier, I’m afraid.’

‘Eight’s fine.’

‘Good. See you then.’

She opened the door, and they stepped out into the corridor.

She studied Patrese’s face. He wondered if she was going to kiss him after all.

‘Noah,’ she said. At least, that’s what it sounded like to Patrese. Noah.

She walked back out into the light.

The office had a weekend feel to it. Half the staff had taken an extra day or two round about the holiday itself, and so Patrese found himself with a morning uninterrupted by the usual round of meetings and briefings.

If he was going to go through with this, he wanted to get it right. In the few months he’d been with the Bureau, he’d been struck most of all by the scale on which things were done. Resources were ten times what he’d been used to in the Pittsburgh PD. Cases were larger and more intricate, focusing on serious criminals rather than the lowlife who formed the staple of every Homicide cop’s beat. Hell, even the agents’ suits were better, their shoes shinier.

He pulled from the shelf the Bureau’s Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines – MIOG, as it referred to itself, with the usual inability of any bureaucracy to resist an acronym – and found section 137, ‘The Criminal Informant (CI) Program’.

Worse than having no human sources, the text began, is being seduced by a source who is telling lies.

Typical Bureau, Patrese thought; assume the worst, right from the get-go. But he took the point. He didn’t know the first thing about Cindy, and until he did, his default would have to be that she was yanking his chain unless specifically proven otherwise.

Failure to control informants has undermined costly long-term investigations, destroyed the careers of prosecutors and law enforcement officers, and caused death and serious injuries to innocent citizens and police.

This, too, Patrese knew full well. He’d run informants in his days on the Pittsburgh Homicide beat, usually gangbangers in between prison sentences who’d have sold their grandma for a hit of crack and lied as easily as they breathed. Smart lawyers picked government cases apart on technicalities, the perps walked free, and heads rolled; sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.

Cindy was, potentially at least, a different kettle of fish altogether. Whether that would make her easier or harder to control, Patrese had no idea.

Informants must be classified according to one of the following 12 categories: Organized Crime (OC); General Criminal (C); Domestic Terrorism (DT); White-Collar Crime (WC); Drugs (D); International Terrorism (IT); Civil Rights (CR); National Infrastructure Protection/Computer Intrusion Program (NI); Cyber Crime (CC); Major Theft (MT); Violent Gangs (VG); Confidential Sources (CS).

White-collar crime, Patrese presumed, given Cindy’s position, though he couldn’t help but feel the categories were pretty arbitrary. Where did violent gangs end and drugs begin? Couldn’t major theft also be organized crime?

The FBI considers the following factors in determining an individual’s suitability to be an informant: