Extraordinary Rendition (33 page)

“We don’t think any of that is appropriate.”

“Of course you don’t. And at this stage I’m warning you. Not only do I look forward to the report I’m allowing you to give me two days from now—in other words, Mr. Rana, I’m offering you a reprieve—but I’m also giving you a week to respond to Mr. Johnson’s papers asking for dismissal of the case, and the release of his client, on the basis of a litany of horrors he has rehearsed about the deliberate mistreatment of his client over the last seven years.”

“Mr. Johnson’s papers were just given to us two days ago. We’ve only had a short time to review them, but it’s clear to us that Mr. Johnson has put forward a great deal of wild accusations.”

“Has he? I’m not so sure. But that’s why I look forward to your written response.”

“It will take us six weeks to respond, Judge.”

“It will take you one week. I want your papers next Friday.”

By this point, Hal Rana appeared depleted. Byron Johnson had never before seen him even look tired. Ordinarily his tie, white shirts, blue and charcoal suits, turban, and hand-made black shoes were always in place, even in hot weather. That had changed, almost imperceptibly. Hal Rana verged on weariness.

“I’ll report all of this, Your Honor, to people with higher pay grades than I have.”

“Of course you will, Mr. Rana.” Justin Goldberg at last looked at Byron. “Is there anything you want to say, Mr. Johnson?”

Gracefully, Byron Johnson rose to his feet. “No, Judge.”

S
HE WAS A COMELY fifty-year-old with her brown hair swept and enfolded, Katherine Hepburn–style, upward from the nape of her neck. She came to his apartment after responding to a small ad Byron had placed in the classified section of the
Village Voice
advertising for a word-processor to type a book-length manuscript. There must have been something intriguing, he thought, to the world at-large about doing secretarial work for an anonymous writer, since more than eighty people had emailed resumes to the address at the
Voice
that passed the resumes on to him. They may have thought they were sending their resumes to Philip Roth. No wonder writers were legendary for all their sexual opportunities.

Her name was Helen Wilson. She said she was an actress and that she would have to work with him on a flexible schedule since she frequently went to calls and, at times, got assignments. They were local, primarily small roles in television commercials. Byron liked the simplicity of her name. And he appreciated her hair and the striking blue eyes in her pale, well-structured face. She said she had been raised in Iowa, and given her looks he wasn’t surprised.

She didn’t seem concerned when she saw that the work would be done in his apartment, not an office. It was Byron who appeared awkward, as if wondering about the propriety of a woman having to come to her boss’s home to work.

He had numbered each page of the six hundred and three yellow sheets on which he had written. He placed them on the work table in front of her after he had taken them out of the bank vault. Helen flipped through some of the pages, glancing only at the handwriting. It was shapely and clear.

“Are you Catholic?” she asked.

“Catholic?”

“Kids in parochial school learn great penmanship.”

“My mother was Catholic,” he said. “Mexican.”

His volunteering of the word surprised him, not her. “So that’s where the
Carlos
comes from. Not from William Carlos Williams?”

“It might. My mother loved poetry.”

There was a fine web of gray hair at her temples. “Did she read you the Williams poem about the wheelbarrow and the rain?”

He laughed. “She had a red wheelbarrow that she used on a flowerbed.”

She touched the neat stack of yellow paper. “Back to business,” she said lightly. “It will take fifteen hours or so to do this.”

“Is that all?”

“Perhaps less.”

“When can you do the work?”

“Do you really want me to do it here? I could get it back to you quickly if I brought it to my apartment. We could make a copy.”

“Helen, it has to stay here. No copies.”

“You authors are so protective. My schedule, as I said, is unpredictable. I’ll be back and forth. Irregularly.”

“Don’t worry, I never leave. The door’s always open.”

She wore very simple clothes—a black sweater, black pants, delicate slip-on shoes, and a red and black scarf draped over her shoulders.

“I know who you are,” she said.

He smiled. “So, who am I?”

“You’re the lawyer who represents that Arab man.”

“I am.”

“I see you on television. I read about you in the paper. You’re probably all over YouTube and the Internet, although I don’t look at those.”

“I don’t either.”

Over the next few days he looked forward to her visits. Helen had a life that belied her settled, attractive, and very pleasing appearance. Sometimes she arrived at seven in the morning. Byron woke every day at five-thirty: “I’m an urban farmer,” he told her when she asked whether he was bothered by such an early arrival. On other days she would appear at seven at night, entering with that cold scent of winter.

She told him that she was in rehearsal with a small group in the East Village for
The Cherry Orchard
. They performed one night each week in the auditorium at the Washington Irving public high school on Irving Place. “I play a matron,” she said. “You should come by soon. The tickets are five dollars each.”

When Helen was in his apartment she worked at his steel-and-glass desk, her half-glasses on the bridge of her small nose, her back completely straight, a former dancer’s posture. He
never left the apartment when she was there. It was not simply because he liked her presence, but also because he didn’t want her to copy his papers and leave with them. He was unsettled about the concept of trust. He brought her coffee and tea and sweet rolls.

She was a determined worker who typed steadily and without any reaction to the substance of the words. She could have been typing an article on farm machinery. He waited for the point where she might express surprise or interest. He knew she was an intelligent, alert, and articulate woman. If she knew who he was—Rush Limbaugh had called him the “loony lawyer”—then she had to know that he was writing a long narrative on the arrest and imprisonment of an Arab facing the death penalty, the alternating tortures of physical abuse and total isolation for years, the recurring appearances of Andrew Hurd and Tom Nashatka in his life and later in Byron Johnson’s life, Byron’s visits to a well-known Imam, an acerbic and difficult judge, the daily presence of a loved woman in his life, Byron’s friendship with Simeon Black, Simeon’s killing, and Byron’s all-pervasive fear.

During one of her late-night visits, Helen said: “Do you have anything else for me? I’ve finished.”

“You have? So soon?”

“What do you want me to do with this?”

“It’s in the hard drive and on disk?”

“Yes. Do you want me to print a copy?”

“Just one.”

She turned to the computer. On the screen he saw the title page:
Extraordinary Rendition: A Report on a Prosecution
.

“How many pages did it turn out to be?”

“Two hundred and seventy-three.” The only sound in the apartment was the methodical shuffling of the pages sifting out of the printer. “What are you going to do with this?”

He smiled: “‘There are such things that I shall do as shall be the terrors of the earth.’”

Without skipping a beat, she said: “
King Lear
.”

“An actress. I should’ve known you’d recognize that.”

In her steady, unaccented, and lucid voice, she said, “Two nights ago, two men began to speak to me at the corner of Spring and West Broadway. I was walking home from here; it was milder than usual. ‘Ms. Wilson,’ they said, ‘are you working for Byron Johnson?’ Because of the weather, there were lots of people on the street. I was startled, not afraid.”

“Who were they?”

“You know, Byron. One of them was the man on the video. He asked, ‘Will you bring us the book?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said they would pay me ten thousand dollars. I said thank you and walked on.”

Byron felt a gust of regret. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you would get tied up in this.”

She smiled warmly. “That’s all right. It’s one more interesting thing in my interesting life.”

“No, Helen. These people kill people who don’t do what they want. They killed Christina Rosario. They killed Sy Black.”

“I know. I read it here.”

Helen Wilson lived in one of the old townhouses that had been gutted years earlier and divided into five stories of
narrow one-bedroom apartments, a tight warren of living spaces. The building was on East Eighth Street, long known as Saint Mark’s Place; the street was still a relic of the 1960s, lined with second-hand clothing stores with tie-died shirts and skirts in the window displays, shops that sold the paraphernalia of drug use, and health food stores. Even on a winter night the street was crowded, filled with the restlessness and vitality of the young, the odor of marijuana.

There was no elevator in Helen’s building. Byron followed behind her. He could see beneath the light coat she wore that her rear was shapely. He had let go of the pretense that he was escorting her home for her safety.

The narrow living room was crowded with mismatched furniture, the collection of twenty years of living in one place. But it was neat and orderly. On the walls were reprints of photographs by Georgia O’Keefe: a stem on which symmetrical petals were balanced on either side of a soft, fecund opening. And a photograph of hands delicate enough to be a man’s or a woman’s.

“Would you like tea?”

“No, thanks, Helen.”

“A drink?”

“Not now, thanks.” He paused, taking in the womanly sight of her after she removed her coat and the sweater beneath it. “Water?” he asked.

“That’s easy.”

She turned to the tight kitchen. There were no windows in it. Two people couldn’t stand side by side in it. The refrigerator was old, white, and bulky. She handed the glass of water to him. He was thirsty. He drank most of the water.

When he placed the glass on the wicker basket she used as a coffee table, he turned toward her. She was standing close to him. She smiled faintly. He took one of her hands. She continued to smile.

“I think you’re beautiful,” he said. She embraced him. Her body was full. His hand separated the clothes near the small of her back. Her skin was soft.

Helen whispered, “Follow me.” She led Byron Johnson to the bedroom.

B
YRON HAD INVITED TEN reporters to the press conference. Five were from television, and the rest were writers for newspapers, magazines, and online services. Every reporter he had invited came to the room he had rented at the wood-paneled Harvard Club on West 44th Street.

“Thank you all for coming.” He stood at the front of the room. To his left were fifteen copies of the report, each held together by a rubber band. “All of what I am about to say, and all that is in the report I’m about to give you, is on the record. And you will all be free to take with you what I call ‘the torture video’ attached to each report.”

There was one cameraman in the room. His CNN shield was suspended on a bright ribbon from his neck. On a prearranged signal from Byron, he started the camera. “The man I represent, Ali Hussein, was tortured by United States agents. He was hit time and time again. He was repeatedly forced under water. We have a video that demonstrates all this. It is part of each packet. No one has ever seen even a picture of waterboarding. And the United States has always denied that there was a photo, video, or tape.”

Byron stared for several seconds at the reporters. He was utterly calm. “What you will see is far worse than the photos of Abu Ghraib. Far worse than images of a human being near death, screaming and naked. And that isn’t all. My client
was held in complete isolation for years. His only visitor was a brutal United States agent. My client knows him only as Jesse Ventura. When we speak of terrorists, we need to expand the definition. You’ll see the conduct of Jesse Ventura—whose real name is Andrew Hurd—and I submit that what you will see is terrorism. From a lawyer’s standpoint, it is attempted murder, plain and simple.”