The Hearing (3 page)

A year later Michelle was back in Cambridge, ordering fettucine at a table in Guido’s. Gus saw her from the bar and couldn’t
believe it. All the times he had wanted to call her, talk to her, be with her, the times he had sat alone for hours, thinking
about her, grieving over the smashed fragments of their love—and now here she was.

He steadied himself, slipped off the bar stool, and took a slow walk to the men’s room, circling past her table, making sure.
On the way back he stopped at the table, touched her shoulder, playfully, like it didn’t matter. She turned. A microsecond
of nothing at all, then an explosion in her eyes. He saw such joy there, his legs went limp.

The next day they had lunch. She’d come to Cambridge to see a friend, “and I guess I hoped maybe I’d run into you.” She wasn’t
returning to Harvard. “I’m through with that.” They didn’t talk about the pregnancy. Their love was like a living miracle
not even that pain could kill. Something had changed, something so big even the universe would never be the same. They knew
they were going to spend the
rest of their lives together, and the pain that had driven them apart had never happened. They wouldn’t even talk about it.
How could you talk about it? It had never happened.

They spent the next weekend in Montgomery, so he could meet her family. A red-clay, deep-country road, overhung with Spanish
moss. Steam rising from the flanks of riding horses in a paddock. An antique wood-decked pickup truck. A white porch running
the length of the house, with ceiling fans and wooden chairs. Her father was huge—crew-cut hair, white socks, a smile warmer
than the weather, and a redneck drawl Gus could hardly understand. Two brothers, teenagers, all grins and muscles. Her tiny
mother, bony, beautiful, black curly hair, never at rest, never empty-handed. Trays of drinks and food.

Did they know what had happened? They would never have approved. They were so religious. There didn’t seem to be any problem
Michelle’s father didn’t expect God to solve. “And does he?” Gus asked. “One way or another. Not always my way, but what right’ve
I got to tell the potter how to make pots? Ain’t that right? Is that right?” Had Michelle had the pregnancy ended by herself,
never told her family? Their reaction to him gave no clues. Their affection seemed as genuine as it was unreserved. No, they
couldn’t
know.

He sat with the family on the porch, his sweat chilling under the fans, drinking cold white wine pressed from grapes that
grew on vines by the house. If this wasn’t heaven, it was close enough.

The ranch had a hundred head of cattle, six Thoroughbred horses, and two springer spaniels called Touch and Go. Michelle took
him for a walk down a wooded hill, past pecan trees, to a pond stocked with blue gill. “What do you think?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He looked at her.

She said, “Not just the pond. The whole—everything.”

“I think your dad’s great. It’s all great.”

She beamed. “He only wears those socks when he—”

“I love his socks.”

They walked another fifty yards past the pond to a swamp with cypress trees.

“My dad shoots turkey in there. My mom marinates it in wine—what you were drinking?—and she makes pies from the pecans. In
the spring—”

“It’s great, Michelle.” Words came to his lips, but he held them back. Then he said, “I wish I’d been born here.”

She laughed. “In this hick place?”

“Yeah, in this hick place.”

“You live in a palace.”

She’d never seen his family’s home, but she’d heard.

He said, “It’s a very complicated palace.”

When Gus graduated from law school, they married, moved into a two-bedroom house on the other side of Montgomery from Michelle’s
family’s ranch, and tried to have a child. After twelve months, they saw a doctor. Gus’s sperm count was normal, but an inoperable
obstruction in Michelle’s Fallopian tubes made pregnancy impossible. The doctor was sympathetic but firm. They would never
have a child.

They left the doctor’s office and drove home in silence. Gus knew what she was thinking. She’d had her chance. There wouldn’t
be another. He had never been sadder, had never loved her more. There were no words worth speaking.

Gus gave up the idea of managing his family’s money, and eventually talked himself out of the guilt. His father would continue,
and when he was too old they’d have to hire an outside professional. Gus wanted a life of law. He wanted to be a judge. His
real dream was to sit on the Supreme Court, interpreting the laws of the most powerful nation on earth. He hardly dared to
think that that would ever happen, but it focused his ambition.

Gus worked seven months as a Montgomery County public defender, despised it (the clients were sullen, lying, and usually guilty),
but made enough of a name for himself to win an assistant’s job in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Michelle wasn’t too sure about
the job change. It made her nervous, Gus sending people to jail.

“I don’t send them to jail, they send themselves to jail.”

“That’s not what I mean. What if they decide to, you know, do something?”

“Hurt me?”

“Or us.”

“They won’t, Michelle.”

Anyway, it was better than if he’d been a state prosecutor, dealing with robbers and killers. People who committed federal
crimes in Montgomery were mostly check forgers, bank embezzlers. Not the violent people.

G
us and Michelle’s best friends were Carl and Esther Falco. Carl was Special Agent in Charge of the DEA’s Montgomery office,
and Gus often handled his cases. One day, when Gus had been in the U.S. Attorney’s office about a year, Carl called him at
work.

“You gotta see this, Gus.”

“What is it?”

“The Gardens.” A suburban development north of Montgomery. “Be quick.”

“That’s not a what, that’s a where.”

“You’ll know when you get here.”

“Tell me now. I’m busy.”

“Not too busy for this.”

He hung up.

Carl and Esther had a son named Paul who was nine and a six-year-old girl called Ali. Gus and Michelle often baby-sat for
them, sometimes overnight or through weekends. The two families had dinner at each other’s homes about once a week, and sometimes
they went to church together, usually at the insistence of Esther.

Carl was from New York, a man of few words, and he had many of the same values as Michelle’s father. “Carl has a very simple
life,” Esther told Michelle with a resigned smile. “All he wants to do is put traffickers in prison, and he works about twenty-five
hours a day, eight days a week. I wish he was home more, but at least he’s doing something that counts. Anyway, that’s what
I keep telling myself.”

When Gus got to the Gardens he found six DEA agents and about a dozen men from the ABI, the Alabama Bureau of Investigation.
Most of them were inside a barn, standing around a horse stall. The barn was stacked with large, half-opened cardboard cartons.
Each carton contained twenty-four wrapped packages that looked like loaves of Wonder Bread. But they weren’t bread. A false
floor had been lifted to expose wooden stairs down to an underground chamber. Carl took Gus’s arm. “You’re not gonna believe
this.”

At the bottom of the stairs, six feet underground, Gus stood in an area the size of his bathroom. The walls were cardboard
cartons like the ones in the barn. Straight, ahead, a floodlit tunnel the agents had made by removing carton after carton
reached to the far end of what appeared to be an enormous cavern. Two other tunnels extended to the walls left and right.

“It took us half an hour,” Carl said, “to get to the far
walls. If the cartons are packed in here solid, there’s one thousand three hundred of them. And if each one holds what the
ones upstairs hold, there’s over sixty thousand kilos in here.”

Sixty thousand kilos of cocaine was worth $1,200,000,000 wholesale—over ten times more than had ever before been seized in
the United States. Even Gus had trouble appreciating the implications. This would have to be a major—
the
major—storage and transhipment point for the entire eastern half of the United States.

But you couldn’t put cocaine in prison.

“You get any flesh with this, Carl?”

“Come with me.”

The agents had three men, each handcuffed in the back of a different DEA car. One of the men was so fat his belly touched
the rear of the front seat. The windows were down, and Gus could smell the sweat.

“You read them their rights?”

“They slept through it.”

“We know them?”

One of the men looked familiar.

“Only one.”

Carl was smiling.

Gus said, “So?”

Carl showed him a Colombian driver’s license. The fat guy. “Ernesto Vicaro-Garza.”

Gus turned the card over, examined the reverse side, turned it back to the front. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. Just a
few years after Gus’s summer vacation from law school, when he had watched the teenaged Ernesto Vicaro pass champagne at the
ranch, Ernesto had appeared in intelligence reports as a rapidly rising figure in the cocaine in
dustry. Only six months ago Gus had read a DEA intelligence report that spent twenty-one pages profiling the young Vicaro.
He’d been a member of the Colombian senate, a diplomat, an intelligence officer. The aging father, for years a controlling
power in the Latin cocaine industry, had become too enfeebled to prevent his son from seizing power. The young man’s reputation
for cunning, ambition, and brutality had continued to grow. A fourteen-year-old Mexican girl who lived on his ranch outside
Cali, one of twelve teenagers available to him and his guests, had called him “an obese monster.”

“When I told you you wouldn’t believe it, I didn’t just mean the coke.”

Gus said, “Why’d he come?”

Carl shrugged, still smiling. “Couldn’t stay away? Sixty thousand kilos. Had to have a look. Everything’s new. Hasn’t been
here more than a month.”

“How’d you find it?”

“Dumb luck. A vet came for one of the horses, smelled something funny, called a friend at the ABI who called me, and we came
over together.”

“Pride and greed. Get you every time. The old man’ll be ashamed.”

“Family breakdown,” Carl said. “No respect for parental authority.”

“Fills the prisons.”

The TV had it that night, the papers in the morning. Biggest drug seizure in the history of the country. And Ernesto Vicaro-Garza
was the biggest arrest. He and his father were legends. They controlled a Pan-American holding company that owned, among other
things, a multinational corporation of
banks, hotels, restaurant chains, shopping malls, soccer teams, health-care facilities, and a so-called trading conglomerate
named TransInter, which turned out to have at its center one of the largest cocaine trafficking organizations on earth.

Ernesto Vicaro and his father owned virtually all the cocaine coming out of Colombia, which was just about all the cocaine
in the world. DEA had run more than five covert operations over the past twenty years trying to entice the elder Vicaro into
entering the States, where he could be arrested on a number of secret federal indictments. Now, finally, miraculously, sitting
in the Montgomery Federal Correctional Center was his son, heir, and chief operating officer. Given his father’s age and diminishing
operational importance, the son was the bigger catch.

Gus’s phone never stopped ringing. TV crews arrived. Newspapers. Magazines. Everyone wanted to talk to Gus. Every talk-show
host from Jay Leno to Oprah wanted to fly him in for interviews.

Gus told his secretary, “Tell them I’m busy. Talk to them yourself.”

Even Dave Chapman called.
Senator
Dave Chapman. They’d been friends since Harvard, when Chapman accidentally broke Gus’s arm during a lunchtime game of touch
football. Chapman had missed an afternoon history test, knowing it meant a failing grade, so he could stay with Gus at the
hospital while they set the arm. He was two years ahead of Gus, had come to Harvard from a Denver high school where he’d been
a star running back, president of the student body, editor of the school paper, and valedictorian. He was big, bright, friendly,
good looking. Chapman went on to Harvard Law, followed by Gus two years later. They
stayed in touch, had a meal together at least twice a month. After graduation, applying for a management job at ABC Television,
Chapman was offered a spot as a correspondent. But the looks and personality that qualified him for on-camera TV also qualified
him for politics, and within six months he’d left ABC and was running for the Colorado state legislature. He was elected.
Four years later he was in Washington, in the Senate. People began talking about him for the Presidency.

Chapman called the day after Vicaro’s arraignment.

“You’re famous, Gus.”

“Yeah. I oughta run for the Senate.”

“It’d be great to have you here. We could clean this place up.”

“You’re doing all right without me.”

That evening, Gus arrived home to find Michelle in the living room with Carl’s daughter, Ali, on her lap. Esther had taken
Paul with her to the supermarket.

Michelle was watching the TV news, a deep frown clouding her face.

“Where’s this going, Gus?”

“Ernesto Vicaro’s going to prison, is where
he’s
going.”

“They’ve been talking about all the people he’s killed.”

“He hasn’t killed any U.S. prosecutors.”

“He’s never had to.”

“Michelle, don’t worry. The TV exaggerates everything. Tomorrow they’ll forget all about it.”

It was a week before the suppression hearing, when the defense team—six attorneys from Miami, New York, and Washington—would
argue that the search warrant had been flawed, that it was improperly executed, that the cocaine had been illegally seized,
that the evidence—$1.2 billion
worth of cocaine—should be suppressed. Without the cocaine, there was no case. It was the quickest, easiest way for Ernesto
Vicaro to win.

At 10
A.M.
on Monday, John Harrington, a member of the defense team, appeared in Gus’s office. He was from Washington, with a million-dollar
reputation and a smile to match. “Just wanted to introduce myself.”