The Informant (29 page)

Neil looked uncomfortable. “Lydia, I can’t take it.”

“You’re being silly. Please take it. I’ll feel insulted if you don’t.”

“Regulations.”

“What regulations?” Lydia frowned.

Neil sighed, dropping his arms to his sides. “An agent can’t take anything from an informant or a suspect—”

Her anger was quick. “Goddamm it, who the hell are you to come into my house and insult me!”

“Lydia, I tried to tell you the other night, when we were out seeing the windows. Believe me, believe me, I don’t want to hurt you, but it’s regulations, I’m not kidding.”

“Why? Who the hell make up this rule, huh?”

“Lydia, if an agent takes
anything
from an informant, it means he can go into court and get killed by a defense attorney. Far as anyone is concerned, he’s been bribed, and nothing he says is worth listening to. That’s how it is. I don’t like it, but that’s how it is.”

She threw the watch at him, watching him duck with his arms crossed in front of his face. “Get out! Get the hell out!”

“Lydia, please …”

She ignored his pleading. “Out! You make me feel cheap, like dirt! I’m good enough to make cases for you, to help you become a
big
man! I’m good enough to turn in my friends for you, huh? I know what’s gonna happen to them one day. They go to jail, and all your people be happy. But you no want my present. I shop for you, I wrap it, goddamn you! Get out! Get out!”

She wept, screamed, cursed him, and when he’d gone, she leaned back against the door breathing hard, her eyes closed.

“Mommy? What’s wrong, mommy? Where’s Neil? I have something for him …” Olga walked into the living room, a small blue-wrapped package in her hand.

At eleven-thirty that same morning, forty-five minutes after leaving Lydia’s apartment, Neil Shire stood in front of the bureau’s crowded conference room pointing at a small portable blackboard. He was speaking to group heads in intelligence and enforcement, to assistant regional directors, to lesser section chiefs, and what made him nervous was that he was also speaking to the head of the New York office as well as to four men from the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. One of those men was the third-highest-ranked man in federal-narcotics-law enforcement. Anyone of a dozen men in the room could have made or broken Neil Shire’s career with a telephone call. Damn right he was uptight.

Neil pointed to a column of names on the left side of the blackboard. “The Cubans, they’re calling the shots. Mas Betancourt and his lieutenants. Along with these two names here, they’re the importers, the ones who’ll be bringing the white in. The blacks”—Neil pointed to a column of names on the right—“are involved solely in financing, as far as I’m able to tell. They’re putting money into the deal, maybe furnishing lower-level manpower. Now, two of these names, Kelly Lorenzo and Jackie Zach, are importers. Just a handful of blacks are on this level, but Kelly and Jackie we know for sure can do weight. From what I hear, Kelly may have more to do for Mas than just put up money. No one’s talking too much about that, but I’ve heard a few things that point to it.”

“Shire?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get somebody to talk about that.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man who’d given Neil that order was Berger Picard, a white-haired jowly man in a brown suit, who sat directly in front of Neil, his arms and legs crossed as though keeping the world at bay. Berger Picard, fifty-three, six-feet-two, and only five pounds over his college football playing weight of two hundred and fifty-five, was the number-three man in all of federal-narcotics-law enforcement, and because of his size, along with his power in enforcement, it was inevitable that he be obeyed. Berger Picard had long ago developed the habit of rarely raising his voice. A request from him came carved on a stone tablet.

Neil knew that this Mas Betancourt case was important, because men from the Justice Department wouldn’t have flown all the way up to New York to talk to him if it weren’t. They would have read his reports or talked to him on the telephone or ordered him to hop a shuttle down to D.C. and present himself to them in their expensively carpeted offices. Instead, they had come to see him. And so had everyone in the bureau’s New York office who mattered. True, the case was important, big and getting bigger. But there was another reason for the full house this morning, and Neil knew it. If there was any glory in this case, if there were going to be headlines, Neil would have to share them with certain people.

They wanted to be in on the kill and the credit. Which meant that Neil was sitting on something big.

He grew more confident as he talked. “Intelligence has been gathering information on these names we’ve turned up, and those reports have been made available. The Cubans, as usual, are the best organized, the smartest, the toughest. They stick together, help each other, and usually don’t use outsiders. What Mas Betancourt is doing now is an exception. An example of their sticking together is Mas borrowing talent from Miami, these names here at the bottom—Cristina Reina, Carlos Boyd, called Carlos El Indio, and René Ateyala. They all work for John-John Paco in Miami, but because Mas Betancourt’s lieutenants are all out of the country, he’s being given the loan of these three. Only two have jackets, El Indio and René Ateyala. Their priors include everything from dealing to rape and murder. The woman, Cristina Reina, has no priors. She’s one of John-John’s lieutenants, and the way we reach her is through Jorge Dávila, a C.I. from Miami who was just reassigned here.”

Berger Picard interrupted in his soft voice. “Who’s the controlling agent on Dávila?”

Neil frowned, now knowing what to say next. Saul Raiser, sitting directly behind Berger Picard, leaned forward over the large man’s shoulder. “Sir, we’re assigning him to a team in intelligence.”

Berger Picard didn’t turn around. “Give him to Shire.”

Raiser pressed his lips together as hard as he could. “Yes, sir.”

Neil moved his eyes quickly to the blackboard. The Razor had been cut by somebody with a sharper knife. Dávila belonged to Neil.
All right!

Neil kept on talking, forcing himself to slow down and not get so excited that he ended up babbling like a parrot on Benzedrine. “Dávila mentioned seven and a half million as the price of Betancourt’s white. He got the figure from Cristina Reina, who got it from Barbara Pomal. At the going price for white in Marseilles, which is twelve to fifteen thousand a kilo, we figured that Mas is buying five hundred kilos or more.”

That
got a reaction from the room. Some small whistles, an intake of breath, whispers, some head-shaking. Oh, sure, there were people in the room who didn’t believe that anyone could get his hands on that much white, let alone seriously consider bringing it in. But the doubters kept quiet; there were too many people in the room who believed it was possible, and these people were more powerful than the doubters.

“With five hundred keys,” said Neil, “Mas isn’t taking chances. He’s looking for twenty mules, and it’s a good bet he won’t be having them come in all at once and on the same route. We’ve found a couple of Mas’s routes in the past, but it goes without saying that he’s come up with some new ones. We’ve got nothing so far on his mules or routes. All we’ve got is names of distributors and subdistributors, the people who’ll probably be buying when the load comes in, the people who are putting up the money in advance. I’ve met some of them, scored dope from some of them, Cuban and black. I’m moving up. It’s taking time, but that’s how it’s done.”

A voice to Neil’s right said, “When do you think you can meet a top lieutenant? I know you may never get to an importer, but what about one of his lieutenants?”

The speaker was Chester Herzen, Berger Picard’s assistant. Herzen was forty-eight, slim, developing a paunch and kept fingering his rimless glasses while Neil spoke. Herzen rarely spoke unless absolutely necessary, and he seemed to know everything about everybody. The word on him was that he was one of the few men alive who wasn’t afraid of Berger Picard, which is why the big man kept him around.

Neil said, “I can’t say, sir. It helps that they think I’m loaded, that they think I’m an up-and-coming Italian.”

A few laughs, snickers.

Herzen said dryly, “If they ask, you’d better have some dirty books to show them.” More laughs, louder ones. Italians were heavily into pornography, massage parlors and pornographic bookstores, theaters, and film companies, particularly in the East.

“Yes, sir. I think they’ll want to trust me more, before I can meet anybody heavier. I don’t want to push, so I can’t tell you how long that’ll take. The deeper I get in, the more careful I’ll have to be.”

Berger Picard said, “You’ve done fine, agent Shire. We’ve got twenty-five names, and we can make cases on them—possession, sale. We can even sic Internal Revenue on them, but what we want is conspiracy, and for that we’ve got to get them all in the same bed at the same time. You give us one top lieutenant, and we may have something. It won’t be easy rolling him over, but we can try. If we link him into the distributors we already have, that might be the beginning of conspiracy. Might be.”

Conspiracy meant getting enough evidence to prove that three or more people were teaming to sell or smuggle dope. With a conspiracy case, you could take down a roomful of people, even if some of them never went near dope. But you needed a good case of conspiracy to impress a jury.

Picard turned to Oliver Barth, forty-five, lean and handsome, the man who ran the bureau’s New York office. “Any taps?”

Barth shook his head. “No. You have to bleed to get a court order for one of those, so I thought we’d save our wiretaps for a lieutenant or somebody heavy.”

“Put one on Mas and his three lieutenants. You have any trouble with a judge in this town, call me.”

Barth nodded. He didn’t impress easily, but he was impressed by Berger Picard. So was Neil. There were twenty-five men in the room, and all of them seemed to walk quietly and talk softly around Berger Picard, even Oliver Barth, who’d worked his way up from the street to forty thousand dollars a year and was rumored to be next in line for any top position the bureau might have open down in Washington. Meanwhile, Barth waited and made a lot of people at the top nervous every time he was called down to Washington. He jogged five miles a day, was married to a woman with money, owned an excellent gun collection of early-American flintlocks, and had spoken to Neil Shire only once in the nine months Neil had been in New York. That had been on the elevator, and Barth had said to Neil, “You dropped your newspaper.”

Neil cleared his throat. What he had to say next might go down wrong with some people, but it had to be said. No sense holding back and making trouble for himself later. “Dávila said Cristina Reina’s been approached three times this, year by the CIA to put them in contact with people she knows in Cuba. Apparently she’s been asked to do favors for them before.”

“We know that,” said Berger Picard.

“They’ve approached her since she’s been in New York,” said Neil.

The reaction in the room indicated this was the first time anyone had heard this bit of news. “Dávila told me that this morning.”
When I met him coming out of Lydia’s apartment, the bastard. Did he sleep with her? Maybe he just dropped by to help her trim the tree. Sure.

Oliver Barth frowned, lining his handsome forehead. “You saw Dávila this morning?”

“Yes, sir. I dropped by to see my informant, and he … he was coming out of her apartment.”

“I see. What else did he say?”

“Just that he was having lunch with Cristina Reina today, and he’d be checking in with us.”

Berger Picard stroked his nose with a large thumb. “He’ll be checking in with you from now on, Shire.” And it hit Neil: no one in the room had asked whether or not Neil thought the CIA was involved in Mas’s plan to smuggle perhaps a quarter of a ton of white heroin into America. No one had asked, because no one had wanted to hear the answer. Would there be a cover-up if “The Company” had a piece of Mas Betancourt’s action? Neil didn’t think so. You couldn’t really cover up these things forever, you could only delay the news getting out. You have just seen a whole lot of caution going down, folks. You kept those kind of thoughts to yourself, acting on them when the time came. From what Neil had heard about Berger Picard, he wouldn’t cover up for anybody; whoever had to go down would go down. First, Berger Picard would make sure he had an airtight case, and then he would sneak up behind whoever he wanted to bring down and simply press the person’s skull between his hands, which were the size of a bureau drawer.

“Shire?” Berger Picard.

“Sir?”

“Go for keys as soon as you can. Pull yourself up an extra rung.”

“Yes, sir.”

Neil talked for over an hour, introducing Katey, Kirk Holmes, and Manny Hammonds, a thirty-year-old white agent who was now taking Walter Dankin’s place on their team. Neil talked about Lydia Constanza, about Cubans, about the bars and restaurants he had been to in Cuban neighborhoods in Manhattan, Jackson Heights, and Union City, New Jersey, the heavily populated Cuban areas in the Northeast. He talked about blacks, about their continued rise in dope in the middle levels, about the loyalty Kelly Lorenzo had inspired, about the stories he had heard about Kelly, about the rumors that the Mafia might try to push its way back to the top of dope dealing sometime in the next year or so. He was challenged more than once.

“Agent Shire, you said the blacks you’ve spoken to are tying in with Cubans? If this is true, why is it that when you talk about dope in New York, you’re talking about Harlem, which is all-black? Why do blacks need Cubans, when they already own Harlem?”

Neil said, “They don’t have the overseas connections, these blacks. Right now they’ve got Mexican brown, but they don’t know how long that’s going to keep coming in. Mas Betancourt has given them his word they’ll have white, and white’s the biggest seller of all. Harlem is full of middle-level distributors and lower-level dealers, but it’s not full of importers. That’s what Mas is offering. He’s offering to bring white in for them, and they know his reputation. He delivers.”