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  I argued. “Why not send Jerry Ramirez down to Atlanta to try to make a case on Caldwell?” I was hoping I could get Jerry in on a big case. “It’s all we’ve got going and we need something.”

  Michael looked at Dewey, who just shrugged, then he said, “Okay, but you’re already breaking the deal with Manasso, and Jerry Ramirez is small-time.” Michael looked at me. “This is on you. Ramirez is over his head. This is two wrongs in a row.”

  That night, Rachel and I celebrated. She was proud of me. I told her about Manasso’s lunch, how sophisticated and strong he was, and that I knew we were going to make major cases because he trusted me. I told her that for the first time Dewey and Michael were listening to me, actually doing what I asked, like giving Jerry Ramirez a chance to make a case on Caldwell, Manasso’s lawyer in Atlanta.

  The next morning Rachel took me shopping. First I bought bright silk shirts and several tailored suits, then a pair of burgundy red boots. Most outrageous of all, she bought me a black cape with leather trim. Now she said, “You look the part of a senior agent, an undercover agent and most importantly, you out-dress Manasso.”

  As we walked along Fifth Avenue with the winter wind blowing in our faces she pushed me against a building and kissed me; her nose was cold. Then she said, “I know you’re a coke addict. If you want my love you must stop. I will help you, but you must trust me. Every day you will do one taste less.”

  THE DIPLOMAT

  Three days later Manasso called and asked that I meet him at the Plaza Hotel for lunch, and would I please wear a shirt and tie, since he didn’t like the open casual look of my appearance. We both arrived on time. He wore a grey pin-striped suit, blue shirt and gold tie. Dewey would have been jealous. I wore my new burgundy boots, blue suit and red shirt, but no tie. Manasso was impressed and got down to business. He knew of a diplomat who was carrying five kilos of heroin coming in from South America. I said it was unusual that he would be carrying heroin and not cocaine. He answered, “Money is money. Detours are safe. He’s being paid to courier it.”

  “Who’s the customer?”

  He looked down at his plate and then looked up and said, “John Belonconi.”

  Belonconi was one of the biggest drug lords in New York City. He was all over our files. No one had been able to touch him, although everyone had tried. No one understood how he got his shipments from Italy. Now I did.

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “That’s not the deal. Your job is to take the information and make a case.”

  “What information? You haven’t given me anything yet.”

  He then took a slip of paper from his pocket. There was a Spanish name on it with an airline flight number and date and time of arrival. “Fernando, the courier, will be staying across the street at the Sherry Netherlands. He’ll be in town for only a week. You’ve got to make the case right away. He comes in day after tomorrow.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take Michael and Dewey long to figure out a strategy. The Bureau had a taxicab in the carpool for surveillance purposes. Fernando would be arriving through airport customs at 3:30 in the afternoon. Pike and the other agents stacked and controlled the cab line so Silkey, driving the Bureau’s cab, was sure to pick him up at the airport and take him to his hotel. The plan was simple: Dewey would be dressed as the bellman at the hotel. When the cab pulled up, Silkey would open the trunk and take out Fernando’s luggage. He would not place it on the sidewalk, but on the other side of the cab, in the street. Another cab, driven by agent Greenway, would pull up and run over the luggage. Greenway and Silkey would then have a big argument and attract a policeman – Michael in a cop’s uniform – and then Dewey, dressed as a bellman, would try to straighten out the argument and pick up the crushed suitcase and, as its contents spilled out, find the drugs.

  According to plan, Silkey picked up Fernando from the airport, driving the first cab. Greenway followed in his cab all the way to where Silkey parked in front of the hotel. Fernando had only one suitcase. The moment Dewey, dressed liked a bellman, put it in the street, Greenway pulled out and hit the suitcase, driving over it with both front and back wheels, cracking it wide open. Greenway and Silkey started yelling at each other, creating a scene, blaming each other for the crushed – and now wide-open – suitcase. Michael and Dewey rushed over to pick up the broken suitcase. Dewey found the five bags of heroin. The sting went down perfectly.

  The whole scene seemed too easy. Dewey found the kilos of heroin in the suitcase immediately and showed them to Michael, bragging how this was now his case. But Pike moved in and pushed Dewey aside, almost knocking him down and grabbing the evidence. Pike did not trust Dewey or Michael, and after what I had seen Dewey do with the heroin in the Scarluci case, neither did I. Pike told Dewey to take the broken suitcase and scattered clothes back to the Bureau while he took charge and initialed the bags of white powder. Pike put the five bags in his briefcase.

  Pike and I interviewed Fernando. He honestly believed that the whole thing was a freak accident. We had five kilos of higher-grade heroin. Fernando sat there shaking with fright. Pike said politely, “Don’t worry about a thing. Take your suitcase and clothes and go back to the hotel. We don’t want any embarrassments here. If you cooperate with us, no one will know anything and you’ll be back home in a short time. We just want your customer. We’ll come and visit you tomorrow.” But then Fernando’s lawyer walked in the room, claimed diplomatic immunity and demanded his release.

  The case against Fernando was coming apart fast. I didn’t know what to do. Pike called Blanker into the room to help. He apologized for the arrest and said Fernando could leave.

  Then he screamed at us, “Who had possession of the junk?”

  Pike replied proudly, “I took immediate possession of it when Dewey and Michael found it in the suitcase in the street. I saw the whole thing go down, I had sole possession.”

  Blanker turned red with anger. “You imbecile! There is no heroin. All five kilos are talcum powder. It was a set-up. Get Michael in here now.”

  Michael came in, calmly smoking a cigarette, and Blanker told him what happened. Then Michael said, “Who thought we could make a case on a diplomat in the first place? Obviously the heroin has already been delivered to Belonconi; the talcum powder was a decoy. Manasso is playing us.”

  “Now what?” I asked, realizing that once again my case was out of control and that I needed Michael’s help.

  “Who gives a fuck about a meatball diplomat named Fernando?” Michael said, losing his patience with me. “You want Belonconi? Take Silkey and go to Fernando’s hotel and listen in on his phone conversations.” He turned to Blanker. “You have enough to get a warrant for the hotel phone tap, you have an informant, Belonconi’s phone number in Fernando’s address book, and now the decoy phony kilos. Fernando’s your informant. Diplomats don’t go to jail, but make good rats. They’re supposed to tell the truth. From the wiretap we’ll get a search warrant for Belonconi’s restaurant and make a case.”

  There was stunned silence. Once again Michael’s lightning-quick genius was going to save a very damaged case. His emergency plan was brilliant. Ed Silkey and I went back to the hotel while Blanker filed for the wiretap on Fernando’s phone.

  As Silkey and I were leaving the office to tap Fernando’s hotel phone, Michael called me aside. “Blanker wants me to stay here and help write up the search warrant. If you get lucky with the taps, we won’t have much time. I have a date tonight and she’s waiting for me at the bar at the Blue Angel, just two blocks over from the Sherry Netherland. Would you give her this from me?” Michael handed me an elegant shopping bag with three gift-wrapped boxes in it. The bag and gifts all had Saks Fifth Avenue logos and blue ribbons. Never, until now, did I have a chance to learn anything personal about Michael. I was curious to meet his girlfriend, even if it just was to apologize for him.

  Silkey waited in the car outside the Blue Angel as I carried the Saks gift bag in to meet Michae
l’s date. I had no trouble spotting her. She was middle-aged, hard-looking, blonde, wearing a tight, white sequined dress. I walked up to her and said, “Here, I think these gifts are for you,” and handed her the Saks bag.

  She looked at me through her cigarette smoke and smiled, “Oh thank you, they’re beautiful. You’re so sweet. Are you Michael?”

  * * *

  Silkey and I sat at the hotel operator’s desk all night to intercept any phone calls in or out of Fernando’s room. Pike also set up surveillance around the hotel to make sure that Fernando didn’t leave. The next morning Fernando called Belonconi and told him he was leaving town, things were too hot. That was all we needed for a search warrant for Belonconi’s restaurant.

  We waited until we saw John Belonconi enter his restaurant in the Bronx and then went in, Pike and Silkey crashing through the front door. We caught Belonconi with the five kilos of heroin and three other Mafia figures. It was the biggest case in years. The papers would refer to it as the “Diplomat Case.”

  The next day I returned Fernando’s passport and made arrangements for him to leave the country. I told Silkey to pick him up at the Sherry Netherland and drive him to the airport. Outside the hotel someone walked up behind the car and shot Fernando in the head, blowing his brains all over the inside of the car. Silkey was covered with Fernando’s blood but never saw a thing.

  Despite Fernando’s death, everyone was pleased with the case. We had caught a high-level Mafia leader and once again neither Michael nor Dewey were mentioned in the report. But I had questions: How did Manasso know about Fernando unless it was Manasso’s drugs? How did Fernando get the heroin to Belonconi? And how did the killer know when Fernando was leaving for the airport? Why did Michael’s date ask me if I was Michael?

  Rachel said there was no way that Manasso could learn on his own when Fernando was leaving town. Someone in the Bureau told him that I asked Silkey to drive him the next day. We both knew Michael and Dewey were behind everything. I’d seen this all before and was angry about the whole case – yet John Belonconi, a major crime boss, was facing twenty years in prison, and five kilos of heroin were off the street. But, at last, I was a senior agent and the other agents respected me.

  CIRCLES

  Now I was a hero at the Bureau, and I couldn’t wait for the next case Manasso would bring to me. I was staying over at Rachel’s apartment at least three times a week and telling Daisy that I was bunking in the office because I was working after-hours clubs. Rachel and I always had dinner together every night, no matter what I was working on. A couple of times a week we would go to disco clubs and dance all night. We would talk for hours about Michael, Dewey, Manasso and the Bureau. I told her about the time I tried to cut my foot off. Her step-by-step method of getting me off cocaine was working. I was down to two snorts a day. She was also dedicated to her job, and often I would hear her talking on the phone to different lawyers, speaking in French or Spanish. She was so beautiful and smart that I knew her influence at work was far more than a legal secretary. Her family was in France and we made plans to visit them in the summer.

  Oddly, my home life improved because of Rachel. I had stopped making love to Daisy months ago but we always had pleasant weekends with Mark. Daisy never stopped loving me; it was just that we had become lost to each other. She waited for me to quit, and bravely fought her loneliness. She never asked about my drinking, or bad moods, or troubles at the office. She just didn’t want to know because she couldn’t help me.

  I waited for weeks for Manasso to surface. Then I came into the office one afternoon. Everyone had already gone except Pike and his secretary. I could see she’d been crying; her eyes were red. On the desk was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photograph. It had been taken from a helicopter or someplace high up. It was a picture of a wheat field or tall grass. The grass was trampled down in a circular footpath that went around and around, growing smaller and smaller, curling in on itself until it stopped in the center. Something lay in the center of the circles. I could see a leg sticking out of the grass, but that was all. I asked the secretary what was wrong, but she was too upset to talk. Pike told her to go home. He said it was pretty rough on her, she’d been crying all morning.

  Again, I asked what was wrong. I was holding the photo in my hand when Pike said, “I guess you haven’t heard. Jerry Ramirez went down. That’s him in the photograph. They shot him in the back of the head with a 22-caliber. It fucked him up so bad he couldn’t stand up. All he could do was crawl. I guess he tried to crawl away. He ended up crawling through the grass all night, but he was crawling in circles … then he died.”

  I stared at the circles in the photograph, trying not to imagine what it was like and how long it took Jerry to die. Pike said it was Agent Jack Connors’s case in Atlanta. There was a shoot-out and the drug dealer, who had killed Jerry, was already dead. Jack Connors was a good street agent, tough and smart. All of his cases were well-organized and professional. Jerry Ramirez was following up on the Manasso case and trying to get close to Caldwell. If Connors said the killer was dead, Jerry’s killer was dead.

  It was not easy to say good-bye to Jerry Ramirez. I kept remembering Michael’s words to me: “It’s on you. Ramirez is in over his head.”

  The funeral was held in Brooklyn and the whole Bureau showed up. Blanker gave a wonderful eulogy about service to God, country, family, and everlasting memories. Everyone was in tears except Jerry’s widow and his two children. She was so medicated she just stared into space and his two children were so young that during the service they rolled a ball between the rows of chairs and chased after it.

  There were so many people that Jerry’s parents held a private wake for just the immediate family. Daisy and I went home and took Mark for a walk in the park for the rest of the afternoon. It was a very sad day and I made it worse. Instead of saying that I was glad to see them, I said, “I want a divorce.”

  Daisy was zipping up Mark’s jacket and pretended not to hear. She held his hand as he walked alongside her. Then she said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know you, you seem familiar. Have we met before?” Then tears rolled down her cheeks.

  We walked on through the park, stopping every few yards to let Mark play or look at the ducks in the pond. Then she said, “You don’t realize what you’ve become. You don’t trust anyone, certainly not me. You think everyone is against you. I used to be afraid you’d get hurt or killed, like Agent Ramirez … but now it’s something worse. You’re hollow, there’s nothing inside you … I’m so lonely I can’t stand it.” She walked over to a tree and tried to hold it for support, but her face slid down the rough bark as she sobbed, falling to her knees, touching the scratches on her face.

  I grabbed Mark and walked ahead a few yards to give her privacy, then waited. After a few minutes she caught up with us, wiping her eyes, and said, “I think it’s a good thing. I can’t stand waiting for you every night, and when you come home you’re dead inside.”

  I moved in with Rachel that night.

  WINTER'S NIGHT

  Rachel welcomed me into her life. In three months she knew more about me than Daisy knew after five years of marriage. It wasn’t Daisy’s fault. In fact, she was right about me coming home dead inside. But I felt alive with Rachel. She understood me – understood what was important to me. She knew what the Manasso case meant to me now, and she encouraged me to come out of it a winner.

  Manasso called and we had lunch at the Plaza again. He told me about an electronics store on Canal Street, only five blocks from our office. They would be receiving a shipment of television sets whose cathode tubes contained heroin. He gave me the name of a longshoreman who would be picking up the TV sets once they cleared Customs. During lunch Manasso seemed to be less friendly than usual and he took more thought in choosing his words. He never mentioned the Diplomat Case until we were through eating. “Chabrier did not have to die,” he said flatly.

  “Who’s Chabrier?”

  “You plant bags of
talcum powder on a man and allow him to get his brains blown out and you neglect to ask his name?” he replied. “I chose you because I thought you were principled, but you’re proving to be a disappointment. Our deal was very simple; twenty kilos of heroin and no independent cases on my associates. I thought I was very clear on these two things. Be very careful, my young friend. Life is a balance sheet; mark well your accounts payable.”

  He handed me a piece of paper with all the information I would need for the next case, then paid the lunch bill and walked out.

  We put the electronics store under surveillance. I worked on the docks as a longshoreman for three days before the shipment arrived. From the docks to the store, we used Dewey’s favorite stunt; we arranged a street accident and grabbed the shipment. The problem was that we had nothing on the electronics dealer. He had simply ordered a shipment of TV sets. We had the drugs, but the dockworker claimed to be innocent and we couldn’t prosecute him because Manasso wouldn’t testify. Five kilos of heroin were off the street but we had no defendant, and no case.

  Nevertheless, Blanker and Pike were pleased and I remained the office hero with my kilo-size cases. Michael again complained that somehow Manasso was manipulating the shipments and setting people up. He argued that the retailer truly didn’t know what was in the TV sets and that someone knew we were going to intercept them at the dock – and set the dockworker up for the bust. Worse than all of that, Michael said Manasso was buying his way out of jail with his own heroin. I knew he was right.

  My withdrawal from cocaine, thanks to Rachel’s help, was progressing very well. I was down to only a line every other day. I knew the addiction was mental so my cure depended on Rachel’s love and encouragement. She was my coach to being a senior agent. Rachel reminded me that it was more important to follow the law than catch criminals. Someday I would clean up 90 Church, not as an informer but as a leader. I looked into her dark eyes and became more determined every day.