The Convert's Song (6 page)

He wasn’t going to say anything about Raymond unless they asked about him specifically. Scared and suspicious as he was, he didn’t know if Raymond had called him. He didn’t plan to give him up for no good reason. Especially after what Raymond had said about protecting him in Chicago.

“Who called you from France?”

“I haven’t even seen the phone. Show me the number. Tell me whose number it is, maybe I can help you.”

Ferribotte put a hand on Mendizábal’s arm. They whispered. Ferribotte indicated the computer screen. They were probably getting updates by e-mail. Mendizábal frowned. Pescatore began to think he had misjudged the dynamic of Mendizábal as boss and Ferribotte as underling. He suspected that Ferribotte did not approve of his partner’s approach to police work.

“Listen, gentlemen,” Pescatore said. He tried to catch Ferribotte’s eye, but the investigator hunched over the laptop. “I don’t want you to lose time. I think you should contact people who can make it clear I’m not a terrorist. I have a well-d
ocumented
history of service in law enforcement.”

“Who do you know at the U.S. embassy?” Ferribotte asked. His voice was quiet and even.

As Pescatore said the name of an FBI agent he had once met, he remembered that the guy had already finished his tour in Buenos Aires.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Ferribotte said.

“I haven’t met the new FBI legal attaché. He just got here.”

“What about your employer?”

Pescatore didn’t even know if Facundo was still alive.

“Mr. Hyman is in intensive care. He wasn’t able to talk, last I saw.”

“Convenient,” Mendizábal growled.

Pescatore regarded him coldly, tasting blood from his cut lip. “He had a heart attack at El Almacén. He was trying to help your GEOF team.”

“If this Hyman”—the interrogator pronounced the name as if it were an obscenity—“employs a
chorro
like you, I am not impressed.”

“I’ll tell you this. He knows there’s more to investigative work than acting like a thug and hitting people who can’t hit back.”

Mendizábal rose. Pescatore crouched behind his free arm, ready for a beat-down. Mendizábal leaned on the table, a wall of blue. His jaws and neck bulged.

He’s gonna give another hard-ass speech before he starts dropping bombs,
Pescatore thought.
He loves to hear himself talk that shit.

“Listen carefully, Pescatore. I have orders from the highest levels to do what I must. That includes methods that make Guantánamo look like Disney World. No matter what we do, even if we kill you, there will be no sympathy for you. Not even the loudest, most cretinous human rights faggots will dare complain. On the contrary, I will get a medal. I suggest you start cooperating.”

As scary as he sounded, Mendizábal didn’t get a chance to deliver. His subsequent questioning was interrupted several times by Ferribotte, who was receiving calls on his BlackBerry. Their rhythm faltered. Something had changed. The guard at the door went out and came back. The three of them huddled. The interrogator and Ferribotte got up and left.

As Pescatore was escorted back to his cell, one thought dominated his mind: From the moment he had seen Raymond at the airport, he had known trouble would follow. He wished that his instincts weren’t so frigging accurate.

Minutes later, Ferribotte brought visitors. A man and a woman stood in the dim cell looking down at Pescatore huddled on the bench.

“Mr. Pescatore? I’m Supervisory Special Agent Tony Furukawa of the FBI, the legal attaché at the embassy. This is a colleague from the French police, Commissaire Fatima Belhaj. You’re going to be released into my care and custody.”

“Good news for me.”

“I’ve worked with Facundo Hyman on some issues. How you doing? Let me get a look at those injuries.”

The FBI agent leaned forward, squinting in the bad light. He had a broad Asian face under a graying black buzz cut. He wore a tweed sport jacket, no tie.

“Inspector,” the FBI agent said with a dry, side-of-the-mouth delivery. “Somebody’s been thumping on my U.S. citizen.”

“It is unfortunate, and I apologize in the name of the Argentine federal police,” Ferribotte replied in English, neither resentful nor obsequious.

“Is that standard policy for material witnesses?” Furukawa asked sharply. “Give them a few
trancazos
to get their attention?”

Pescatore guessed that the FBI agent had learned his Spanish in or near Mexico. The preferred Argentine term for “punches” was
trompadas
.

“At the moment of his detention, he was considered a suspect, armed and dangerous,” Ferribotte responded.

“I don’t see how the information in hand justifies that.” Furukawa sounded dispassionate and bureaucratic. “You see his shirt? He’s a former U.S. federal border agent. And a licensed private investigator. Mr. Pescatore, do you want to file a complaint of excessive force? It is my duty to offer you that option.”

“Mainly what I’d like is some Advil,” Pescatore said. “This officer isn’t the thumper. They got a pumpkin-head gorilla talks like Foghorn Leghorn. They keep him down in the dungeon.”

A smile flickered across the woman’s face. He saw a mane of curls, striking oval eyes, and that easy smile like a flash in the shadows.

“You wanna file a complaint or not?” Furukawa asked.

“No, man, let it go.”

Ferribotte’s thin face registered relief. He led them to a squad room and stood across a counter from the FBI agent. They reviewed paperwork related to Pescatore’s custody status and the property confiscated at his apartment.

“Listen,” Furukawa told Pescatore. “Pending further investigation, they are going to keep your stuff: passport, phones, computer, weapon. If the embassy didn’t have a relationship with your firm, it’d be hard to get you released at all.”

The Argentine investigator offered Pescatore coffee or water. He declined both. As Pescatore signed forms, Furukawa and the Argentine conferred. Pescatore sensed movement behind him. He turned and saw Mendizábal standing with a couple of officers.

The interrogator sipped from a gourd of
mate
tea. His sleeves were rolled up over brawny forearms. He raised his chin. His expression conveyed amused tolerance.

“Come on, muchacho, it could have been worse,” he intoned in Spanish. “We don’t have time to play around in these situations.”

Pescatore hesitated. Everyone in the room was looking at him.

“I suppose you don’t,” he said.

“If you were a policeman before, you know how this business works.”

“Risks of the profession,” Pescatore replied ruefully.

“Exactly.”

“These things happen.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

Pescatore smiled a conciliatory smile. He stepped forward. He offered his hand.

Mendizábal’s eyes hardened. He, too, was aware that they were the center of attention. He appeared to be evaluating risks and assessing contingencies. Slowly, cautiously, he shifted the gourd to his left hand and extended his right.

Pescatore gave him a firm, gentlemanly handshake with sustained eye contact, like his father had taught him. He let the shake linger.

Then he did the most immature, unprofessional, reckless thing he had done in a long time.

He hit him.

His last boxing match had been more than a decade ago. He had not thrown a punch in anger since leaving the Border Patrol. He was overdue. His left fist came up from down low, gathering all the fear and pain and hate and trauma of the past twenty-four hours as it rose. He turned his torso into the punch with plenty of follow-through. The fist hit the head in front of the ear, a dull thunk of bone on bone that sent shock waves back through his arm and shoulder. He grunted with effort and satisfaction.

Mendizábal pitched to his left like a locomotive changing tracks. His
mate
gourd went flying. He and the gourd seemed to hover, suspended in midair, for an unnaturally long time. He belly-flopped to the floor with a resounding crash. The gourd struck and shattered a millisecond later.

Pescatore looked at the stunned Ferribotte.

Pescatore said, “Now that was a cheap shot.”

P
ersona non grata,” the legal attaché said.

Furukawa’s office in the U.S. embassy was decorated with Los Angeles Dodgers and Anaheim Angels posters and paraphernalia. There were photos of college-age kids, but no wife. It was Saturday night. The office glowed in the otherwise empty embassy complex like the command deck of a spacecraft. Pescatore reclined full length on a couch. The FBI agent sat behind his desk. His tone was cheerfully bitter.

“You watch, I’ll get PNG’d,” Furukawa said. “I’ll get kicked out of the country before I’m done unpacking. They won’t let me be leeg-att in fucking Zambia. Thanks to you,
pinche baboso cabrón.
”

Pescatore shielded his eyes from the light. His head throbbed. “How come you talk like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like a
vato
. Like you were born in East LA.”

“I was born in West LA, actually. Went to school with Mexicans, played baseball with ’em. I worked gangs for the Inglewood police before I joined the Bureau. But enough of my curriculum vitae. We were talking about you pulling that Oscar De La Hoya shit.”

During the uproar at the headquarters of the antiterror unit after Pescatore punched the inspector, Mendizábal had struggled to his feet and gone after Pescatore. Staggering like a drunken sailor, shouting: “I’m going to give you a shitstorm of a beating!” Mendizábal’s men had wrestled him out of the room. A supervisor threatened to file charges of assaulting an officer. Furukawa threatened to file charges of human rights abuse. Ferribotte and the French female officer played peacemakers and averted a diplomatic incident.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Pescatore said from the sofa. “They knew I was law enforcement. They could have reached out, explained. I would’ve bent over backwards to help. Instead they treat me like a criminal, smack me around, call me a terrorist. Fuck them.”

The pouches under Furukawa’s eyes gave him a weary air. “Fine. The nasty man hit your facey-wacey. That doesn’t—”

“You got that ‘nasty man’ line from a book.”

“What?”

Pescatore pointed at a bookshelf.
“The Long Goodbye.”

Furukawa glanced up at the novel and back at Pescatore as if he had just been handed a piece to a puzzle that he thought he had solved.

“My favorite,” he said slowly. “Especially the part where the cop says there’s no clean way to make a hundred million bucks. You like Chandler?”

“I liked that one. I read more nonfiction, tell you the truth.”

“Well—Oh, here’s the
commissaire.
I was worried you got lost on the way to the Coke machine.”

Fatima Belhaj walked in carrying two cans of Coke. She put one on the low table in front of Pescatore along with a bottle of aspirin. She was with a French counterterrorism agency. She had arrived that morning to investigate the deaths of two French tourists at El Almacén and other French angles of the case. She spoke multiple languages and was a star of her squad, Furukawa had explained.

Belhaj had said she was of Moroccan descent. Pescatore had never met a Moroccan; she looked light-skinned African to him. She sipped her Coke with full lips over small teeth. Her brown curls had a rusty tinge and tumbled around those heavy-lidded eyes. The eyes reminded him of the angel in the da Vinci painting
The Madonna of the Rocks.
Her suede jacket and jeans were no doubt European and expensive and displayed a generous chest, hips and behind. She slid into an armchair by the couch and crossed her long legs.

“
Et votre tête,
Monsieur Valentín?”

Belhaj touched a finger to her own eyebrow. He realized she was asking about his injury. She talked from her throat, a percussive accent separating the syllables. Her voice was like the rest of her: tough, reserved and sexy.

“I’m okay. Thanks.” He sat up and took a long grateful swig of Coke.

She peered at him. “You should put a bandage.”

“Hey, he’s fine,” Furukawa interjected. “He’s a boxer, he’s used to it. We got a first-aid kit, we’ll hook him up. I’m the one you should worry about. That burning smell in here is my career going down in flames. Fatima, could you brief us now?”

“Yeah,” Pescatore said, opening the aspirin bottle. “What’s this they told me about a French terrorist calling my phone?”

“Our Argentine colleagues were, one can say, imprecise,” she said. “We have not traced the number to an identified person. It is part of a sequence of stolen SIM cards linked to a gang of Islamo-
braqueurs
in the south of France: radicalized criminals that do armed robberies to finance Islamist groups. The number that called to your phone on Tuesday also called to Bolivia. The call was an anonymous tip that was relayed to the Bolivian authorities and allowed the arrest of a terrorist cell in La Paz before the attack here.”

Belhaj produced a pack of Gitanes cigarettes and glanced conspiratorially at Furukawa. He shook his forefinger back and forth.

“This is a smoke-free United States government facility, young lady.”

“Come on, hombre, the place is empty as a tomb,” she exclaimed in Spanish. She used the lisping
th
sound, like a Spaniard. One corner of her grin turned down a bit. Pescatore thought that made it more genuine.

“Negative,” Furukawa said. “I’m a smoker myself, but rules are rules.”

Pescatore had heard nothing yet to implicate Raymond. Things were moving in a strange direction.

“So wait a minute,” he said. “The police lied to me. This wasn’t a terrorist calling me. This was somebody trying to help the good guys. You think he wanted to warn me that an attack was coming in Buenos Aires?”

“I do,” Furukawa said. “And I think whoever it was didn’t mind leaving a trail, because he didn’t block the number. But some of the locals think the Bolivian cell was a decoy, you were in on the real plot, and the call activated the operation.”

“Except I didn’t answer the phone. That doesn’t make sense.”

Furukawa shrugged. “Look at it from their point of view: The Bolivians contacted the French about the tip from a French phone. Fatima’s people were already working on the phone lead when the attack happened here. They found the record of calls to your phone and passed the info to the Argentines, who were frantic. Like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. There was phone evidence connecting you to extremist activity in three countries. They had witnesses and closed-circuit footage putting you at the attack scene.”

“Jesus Christ.” Pescatore put his hands behind his head. He rocked forward and back. “So if I had been using that phone and answered that call, this whole bloodbath wouldn’t have happened!”

Belhaj pursed her lips. “Not necessarily.”

Furukawa came around his desk, removing the tweed jacket. He had short thick limbs in a white button-down shirt and pleated khaki pants. He sat in the armchair at the other end of the couch.

“Fatima’s right,” he said. “The bottom line is you weren’t using that phone. Whoever called with the warning, if that’s what it was, didn’t leave you a message. He didn’t call anybody else in Argentina. There are a lot of unknowns.”

“I’m trying to get my mind around the whole thing.”

“Well, get your mind around this. Now’s the time to tell us anything you might not have mentioned to
la federal.
It’s extremely important if you want this investigation to move forward.”

Pescatore glanced from the FBI agent to the French investigator. He had taken a liking to Furukawa. And he not only liked Belhaj but was having trouble keeping his eyes off her. The embassy seemed safe: a mother ship in the night. His status had improved from suspect to witness. But he faced up to a cold certainty: this was another interrogation.

“Hey, listen, I wanna help,” he began, stalling for time. “But are we sure this guy was really trying to call me? It could’ve been a wrong number.”

Belhaj stared at him. Furukawa folded his arms.

“What are the odds?” he said. “Do you think it was a wrong number, Valentine?”

Stop bullshitting,
Pescatore told himself.
Be a man.

“All right, I’m gonna tell you some stuff.” He took a deep breath. “I’m not sure it means anything, though. Might just be smoke. And I gotta ask you something. I want to play a role in this investigation. I owe it to Facundo. Is that fair?”

The FBI agent frowned. “We’ll see. But don’t forget: you’re my responsibility. So no more
chingaderas.
”

“You got it, Agent Furukawa.”

Pescatore told them about Raymond. He laid out the whole thing, from the lakefront in Chicago to the restaurant in Palermo Hollywood. It was cathartic. Furukawa’s baggy eyes were wide with concentration. Belhaj sipped Coke. Pescatore had their full attention. He felt powerful and vulnerable at the same time.

“Basically, when you get right down to it,” he said, “I have a hunch based on certain facts. I run into Raymond. I give him that number, which hardly anybody else has. Then somebody calls that number. Then all this evil shit happens. But I can’t tell you it was Raymond who called. I can’t claim I understand what’s going on.”

The questions started. His head swiveled. No, he didn’t know where Raymond lived; he had been evasive about that. He had said only that he was changing planes in Miami. No, he didn’t know if Raymond had any link to France; he had mentioned spending time in Europe and having a North African wife. Yes, Raymond had said he had been a drug informant in the U.S. and Latin America.

Furukawa seemed interested in the informant angle and in Pescatore’s suspicions that the meeting at the airport had been staged.

“Let me get this straight,” the agent said. “Why did you think he was lying about running into you?”

“It felt strange. I used to know him pretty good. His mannerisms: he was worried, emotional.”

“I’m walking through a scenario where this Ray is the guy who made the calls. He knows you’re in BA somehow. He’s involved with or aware of the terrorist plots. He finds you, engineers this reunion, couple days later he calls Bolivia—”

“Who got the call in Bolivia, anyway?” Pescatore interjected.

“Unknown. As I was saying: Raymond Mercer hasn’t seen you since way back when you booked on him and he got busted. But he reaches out to you. Why?”

“Maybe he trusts me. And maybe what you said: He knew I had law enforcement connections. He asked about Facundo’s company, the embassy.”

Belhaj toyed with a handful of curls. “Did he explain when and where he converted to Islam? Sunni or Shiite?”

“Argentina. And he’s Sunni, I’m pretty sure he said that.”

Furukawa jotted notes on a legal pad. “Do you know his mother’s maiden name? The Argentine family?”

“Nope. They were originally Lebanese.”

Furukawa was scribbling industriously. He glanced at his watch.

“Okay, people,” he said. “This is the one angle in the whole case that gives me potential jurisdiction. Believe it or not, there wasn’t a single victim who was a U.S. person. Not one. Thanks be to God, knock wood, but still: What are the odds? Fatima, you and I need to hit up our databases on Mercer. We need to tell the federal police right away. What’s that look, Valentine? I can’t withhold a lead.”

“I’m just concerned, you know,” Pescatore said. “It could go to the wrong people.”

“Despite your experience, their CT squad is pretty good. Professionalized. They learned their lessons from the nineties. I’m more worried about the politics.” Furukawa ducked his head confidentially. “There’s an agency in this building that thinks this government won’t survive these attacks.”

“What you need,” Pescatore said, “is somebody you trust to run this down. Feed you intel on the side. To know if they play the case straight.”

Furukawa nodded. “A back channel. But my go-to source for that kind of thing, your boss, is in the hospital. Any suggestions?”

“I think I got a guy.”

The next day, Belhaj picked up Pescatore in a French embassy vehicle. She showed him a headline in a newspaper: “From Policeman to Terrorist.” The investigation had identified a chief suspect, a former narcotics officer of the provincial police of Buenos Aires. A Muslim convert. His body had been found, surrounded by dead hostages, on the top floor of El Almacén. His name was Belisario Ortega. The newspaper showed a photo of a youthful man in uniform, a stern dark face. Some newspapers said the terrorists appeared to be a mix of Argentines and foreigners, but the police had not made conclusive identifications.

Belhaj told him that French record checks on Raymond had turned up nothing.

“If Mercer has been there, he entered from another country or with a different name. We are asking other European countries, but Sunday, the things do not move very fast. Tony said the American records did not find much either.”

“Can I use your cell phone? I don’t have one anymore. Or a gun, or a computer, or a passport. This sucks.”

“An orphan in the modern world,” Belhaj said.

Pescatore remembered her dusky eyes hovering above him the night before while she bandaged his forehead at the embassy. She had insisted on doing it. Her touch was gentle and efficient. Images of her had nagged him overnight, along with the conundrum of Raymond’s role—tipster, terrorist, double agent?—in the eruption of catastrophe in his life.

Pescatore called Café La Biela. He talked to a waiter he knew, a Galician immigrant named Modesto. He was an old-school
gallego
: wary, courtly, talkative. After thirty years in Argentina, he retained the rustic accent of his mountain village.

“Is he there?” Pescatore asked Modesto.

“He just asked for the check,” the waiter reported. “This one doesn’t stay too long on Sundays.”

“Modesto, I’m on my way.” Pescatore gestured at Belhaj to have the driver go faster. “There’s fifty pesos in it for you. Keep him there.”

“How?”

“Talk to him!”

“About what?”

“Soccer, women, I don’t know. Has Televisión Española done any programs on Galicia lately?”

“Well, now that you mention it, there was an interesting report the other day about the region of the Rías Baixas. Apparently the marine currents—”