Under Siege (12 page)

Down the hall past the bathroom to the staircase, and down them two at a time. T. Jefferson Brody was standing by the far wall.

Brody put up his hands as Liarakos charged at him. “Now, Thanos-was

“Get outta my house, you son of a bitch.” He hit him with all he had. Brody went down and two men grabbed Liarakos’ arms.

“Out! All you people get out!” He jerked his arms free. “Party’s over. Everybody get the fuck outta my house.”

He gestured toward Brody, who was sitting on the floor rubbing his jaw. “Drag this piece of dog shit out with you or I’ll kill him.”

At six o’clock the alarm rang beside Thanos Liarakos’ bed. He silenced it and rolled out. He had been asleep less than an hour. He had gotten home from the hospital at three a.m., checked on the kids and the maid, who had graciously agreed to return and spend the night when he called her at midnight. The lady and the kids were all asleep in the same bed. Tired as he was, Liarakos couldn’t sleep. The last time he remembered glancing at the clock it had been almost five a.m.

He showered and shaved and dressed. In the kitchen he wrote a note for the kids: Your Mom is okay. She is in the hospital and was asleep when I left her. You may stay home from school with Maria today if you wish. I love you both, Dad

When he backed the car out of the garage there was a television reporter and a cameraman at the end of the driveway, on the sidewalk. They shouted questions at him as he backed down the drive right at them. Two cameramen. One refused to get out of the way. Liarakos kept the car creeping backward. The reporter, a woman, held a microphone against the driver’s window glass and shouted: “Is Aldana threatening Americans? Is he sane? How much money has he paid you?”

She expected no answers in this theater of the absurd, Liarakos knew. Asking rhetorical questions was the whole show. This was award-winning television journalism.

The rear bumper lightly contacted the camera tripod. Then the man moved.

Liarakos kept the car drifting backward into the street, flipped the transmission into drive, and accelerated away.

The morning was overcast and gloomy. A wind drove the dry brown leaves along the streets in waves. Here and there whirlwinds built little columns of leaves that spun crazily for a few seconds in the gray half light, then flowed on.

His wife was still asleep. The blinds were closed and the lights off in her private room. Still wearing his topcoat, Thanos Liarakos sank into the padded visitor’s chair.

In a few moments his breathing rhythm matched hers. He felt himself relaxing and drifting and didn’t fight it. He had been in his late thirties when he realized that he could see his entire life, all of it, as if he were a detached observer and his life were a play that he had seen several times before. The whole of it was being acted out before him daily, scene by scene. Yet he knew how it had been and how it would have to be.

Staring at his face in the mirror as he shaved every morning, he could see how the lines would deepen, how they would continue to sag, how the hair would gray and fall out. He stared at a face not young and soon to be old.

In nursing homes, he knew, a portion of the daily routine for the elderly is reminiscence therapy. The staff encourages the fragile people waiting to die to look back, to savor the events in their life as if they were great feats woven into a tapestry to instruct generations yet unborn.

Thanos Liarakos was seeing it as it would be, looking back while he was still living it. All his achievements and accomplishments that he had previously thought so important shrank mercilessly from the vantage of this curious double perspective. Court victories lost their sweetness and disasters lost their sting. He had found a way to live with life, or perhaps a merciful God had given him the way. Whichever. Only the perspective mattered.

Drifting now, half asleep, Liarakos swirled the colored glass inside his kaleidoscope of past and future, looking for the pattern. His father had stepped off the boat from Greece with fifty dollars in his pocket and one extra shirt, and parlayed that into five submarine sandwich shops which had sent three sons through college. His mother had raised the sons while his father worked twelve to fifteen hours a day. Those bittersweet days were irretrievably gone. They were as far from the present as the day Odysseus sacked the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. Yet when he talked to his mother he was listening to a voice from the past that would soon be lost to him. So soon, so soon, he would be standing by her grave and his fathers grave, remembering, feeling the life escaping like a handful of sand flowing through his fingers. So he tolerated her diatribes and cherished her.

His daughters-they were his offerings to the human race, to the future and its infinite potential, to God and whatever great and incomprehensible thing He had in mind for the human species. The girls were not special, not gifted-they were just people. They and their children would work and love and marry and have children, long after Thanos Liarakos and the Greek of the sandwich shop were dust. So he loved them desperately.

Elizabeth. Ahh, gentle Elizabeth, with your mother’s heart and your empty desires and your cravings

…

You love a woman for many reasons. A goddess she seems when you are young. But finally you see she is of common clay, the same as you, with faults and fears and vain, foolish dreams and petty vices. So you cherish her, love her even more. As she ages you cling closer and closer, holding tighter and tighter. She becomes the female half of you. The roughening of her skin, the engraved lines on her face, the thickening waistline and the sagging breasts, none of it matters a damn. You love her for what she is not as much as for what she is. Elizabeth, your vices aren’t so petty. You are selling your soul for that white powder. It will lay you in your grave, devastate your husband who loves you, deprive two girls of the mother that you promised to be when you gave them life.

Two nurses entered the room and flipped on the light over the bed. Thanos Liarakos came fully awake and squinted at the two white-clad figures bending over Elizabeth. They pried open her eyes and checked her pulse. The stouter nurse rigged a blood-pressure cuff. Elizabeth groaned but said nothing. She was still intoxicated.

“Lucky,” one of them muttered as she checked the IV drip. “She was lucky this time.”

Liarakos looked at his watch. Almost eight o’clock. The sounds of the staff chattering in the corridors and moving tray carts and equipment came through the open door. He levered himself out of the chair and stood swaying while his heart compensated for the sudden change of position.

He was still standing at the foot of the bed when the nurses bustled out.

She looked old. With no makeup and her hair a mess, Elizabeth looked finished with life. No more warm moments with the children, no more sensuous I-love-yous, no more evenings with the fire crackling and the children laughing. She looked used up. Burned out.

Thanos Liarakos rubbed his face and wondered why he wasn’t crying. Ah, it was that crazy double perspective. He had lived this play before.

But he should be crying. He really should. This was the place he was supposed to cry.

The lead headline in this morning s Post was KEY comro mu. The bold black letters spanned the width of the top of page one. The editor had run a photo of Aidana getting off the plane at Andrews Air Force Base wearing handcuffs and a fierce scowl. Ottmar Mergenthaler and Jack Yocke had shared the byline on the story. Beside the story was Mergenthaler’s column.

Jack Yocke read the four inches of Ott’s column that was on the front page and flipped to page A-1 2 for the rest of it. The federal government and the American people, Mergenthaler said, shouldn’t let themselves be intimidated by Chano Aldana, who was obviously going to try the same tactics here that he had used with mixed success in Colombia. If he thought the American people would respond like frightened sheep to terrorism and extortion, Aidana didn’t understand the American people.

Yocke snorted and tossed the paper on his desk. Maybe he should give Ott a soapbox for Christmas.

His phone rang. “Jack, there’s a reporter from a Dallas paper on the line. He wants to talk to you about your interview yesterday with Aidana.”

“I don’t answer questions. I ask them.”

“Does that mean no?”

“Yep.”

Yocke tucked a notebook and pencils in his jacket pocket as he stirred through his message slips and the unopened mail. He would have to return these calls later, maybe this evening. With his coat over his arm, he went looking for his editor. Maybe he could go down to the courthouse with the rest of the newsroom crew and mill around smartly while Aldana was arraigned.

In a dingy office two doors from the courtroom, Thanos Liarakos arranged his fanny in a chair across a desk from the U.s. attorney for the District, William L. Bader.

Bader was known as an aggressive prosecutor who meticulously prepared his cases. Rumor with the hard tang of truth had it that Bader had judicial ambitions. Liarakos didn’t hold that against him. Bader was a damn good lawyer.

“I dropped in to have a little chat about the shenanigans your people used to get my client on Judge Snyder’s calendar.”

“What shenanigans?” Bader’s eyebrows rose a sixteenth of an inch.

“you can wipe off the innocent look. You’re wasting it on me. The people in the clerk’s office have whispered in the wrong places.”

“So you’d rather be in front of Maximum John or Hanging Jack?”

“Well, you know how these things are. My client might have lucked out with Judge Worth if the deck hadn’t been so neatly stacked against him.” Judge Worth had the reputation, probably exaggerated, of bending over backward to help defense counsel and wmwing the prosecution at every opportunity.

“So why are you in here complaining? The hearing in front of the magistrate starts in twenty minutes. Complain to her.”

“I don’t think opening this can of worms will do you any good in the newspapers, W. People might get the idea the government is conducting a vendetta against Aidana, trying to make him a scapegoat. I thought you might do something for me, and I’ll live with Judge Snyder.”

“What?”

“Make a motion for a gag order. Both sides. Including the defendant.”

Bader’s eyes went to a copy of the Post on the corner of the desk. He spent several seconds looking at it. Then he sat back in his chair and rubbed his nose. It was a big nose, but it was well arranged in a large, square, craggy face.

“You want a trial or a circus?” Liarakos asked.

“That fool is putting the noose around his own neck. I don’t give a damn if he holds press conferences twice a day and threatens to butcher everybody east of Pittsburgh.”

“You don’t know how that will cut and neither do I,”

Thanos Liarakos shot back. “What we both know is that we’re officers of the court. Let’s have a fair trial and not let this deteriorate into some kind of Geraido Rivera spectacular.”

Bader snorted derisively.

“We gotta stopper this asshole before he poisons the” well,” Liarakos said softly. “What if no one with an IQ above fifty is willing to serve on the jury? What if one or two jurors become afraid to convict him?”

“I’ll worry about that when and if it happens. He’s your client, dammit! You want him quiet, you shut him up.”

“Gimme a fucking break, W.”

Bader’s lips twisted and he massaged an eyebrow. He was, Liarakos suspected, trying to decide how Judge Snyder would view the prosecutor’s failure to ask for a pg order if the defendant kept grabbing headlines with veiled threats. Thanos Liarakos sensed that he had won. He sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “All right, all right.”

Bader called for a secretary and dictated the motion. When he finished, he asked Liarakos, “Is that satisfactory to You?”

The defense lawyer suggested a change that strengthened the requested order. He cited a case from memory. Will Bader nodded and waved the secretary toward a typewriter.

“I might as well tell you now,” Bader said, “while you’re in a good mood and feeling full of bonhomie-I’m filing a motion today to seize all of Aldana’s assets. Everything he has, including the money he used to pay your fee, is proceeds of criminal activity. Every dime.”

Both men were well aware of the implications of such a motion. If he were stripped of all his assets, an accused individual could no longer pay his attorney’s fee. Of course, the court could then appoint an attorney to represent him, but the defense that could then be mounted was severely restricted by the limited funds that were, by law, available from the government to pay defense counsel. In effect, by confiscating the defendant’s assets in a civil action the government could greatly increase its odds of ultimately convicting the defendant in the criminal case, where the burden of proof was so much higher. These motions were fair, the judges reasoned, because in good conscience a criminal should not be allowed to use the proceeds of his crime to avoid being punished for committing it.

Critics-mainly defense attorneys-argued that the government ad the cart before the horse: stripping assets from a defendant before he had been convicted of anything seemed to shrink the presumption of innocence to the vanishing point. The problem was that the profits of crime were real-you could touch the money-but the presumption of innocence was a legal fiction, and ninety-nine percent of the time it was just that, fiction. The defendant was guilty and everybody knewit except the jurors. the government grabbed the bucks.

Liarakos, of course, had been expecting just such a motion. The only question was when. The arguments pro and con he knew well, for he had fought these motions in other cases. Some he won, some he lost.

He cleared his throat. “I might as well tell you now, my client has engaged another firm to represent him in any civil confiscation action. Off the record, no doubt you’ll get some assets. But you’ll not get them all.”

“Every little bit helps,” Bader said grinning. “What with the deficit and all, it’s nice to see guys like Aldana contributing tilde their mite. We’ll be serving interrogatories next week, and maybe depositions the following week?”