With a sinking heart, I sat down on a distressed leather love seat. Above me hung a giant dead moose's head. The dead moose looked outraged. “Indicted?” I muttered. “How could he get indicted, Greg? I thought he was cooperating!”
“Apparently not,” Magnum answered, and then he went about explaining how Dave Beall hadn't actually ratted me out; rather, he had gotten drunk as a skunk and then told one of his buddiesabout the note. His buddy, as it turned out, was a rat in OCD's ever-expanding rat stable. And the rest, as they say, was history.
The kids spent the summer in Southampton and had a ball, and then, the day they left, Elliot Lavigne was indicted for securities fraud. He blamed it all on me, of course, which was rather ironic, I thought, considering that I had once saved his life in what I now considered a momentary lapse of judgment. In truth, I was still glad that I had saved his life, because for the entire week afterward everyone was calling me a hero, but now, half a decade later, Elliot was facing five years, and I didn't give a shit.
The Chef, however, was a different story; I didgive a shit about him.
In what would seem like the greatest irony of all, the Chef decided to defy the conventional logic and wisdom and take his case to trial. But why? With the videotapes, the audiotapes, my testimony, Danny's testimony, James Loo's testimony, and the airtight paper trail of my Swiss cover-up—which was laden with the Chef's slippery fingerprints—as well as his two spectacular renderings of his submarine, the SS Money Launderer,he had absolutely no shot of being acquitted. He would be found guilty as charged and be put away for the better part of a decade.
For my part, I would suffer the public humiliation of having to testify in open court against a man whom I had once called a friend. It would be in the newspaper, in magazines, on the Internet, everywhere. And how ironic it was that what I had done with Dave Beall would go down in history as nothing more than a tiny footnote, a minor offset to a dozen acts of betrayal.
At this moment, I was sitting in the debriefing with Alonso and OCD, laughing inwardly after OCD had just said, “You know what, Alonso? You got the worst case of OCD I've ever seen!”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Alonso. “I'm not OCD! I just want to make sure the transcripts are accurate.”
“They areaccurate,” OCD shot back, shaking his head in disbelief. “I mean, do you really think the jury gives a shit whether Gaito said, ‘Badabeep, badabop, badaboop’or ‘Badabop, badabeep, badabing’?They're both the same, for cryin’ out loud! The jury knows that!”
Alonso, who was sitting to my right, turned his head toward me ever so slightly and flashed me a knowing wink, as if to say, “You and I both know this is important, so pay no mind to the sputterings of this FBI thug!” Then he looked at OCD, who was sitting on the other side of the conference table, and said to him, “Well, Greg, when you go to law school and pass the New York State bar exam, then youcan be in charge of the tape recorder!” He let out a single, ironic chuckle. “But, until then, I am!” Then he pressed the rewind button again.
It was close to eleven p.m., and the Gaito trial was less than a month away. For six weeks now, since just after Labor Day, we'd been working into the wee hours of the morning, trying to “nail down” the transcripts. It was a painstaking process, during which the three of us would sit in the subbasement of 26 Federal Plaza and listen to the tapes and make corrections to what were rapidly becoming the most accurate transcripts in the history of law.
Alonso was, indeed, a good man, despite being so tightly wound that I was certain one day he would take one too many deep troubled breaths and simply stop breathing. Everyone called him Alonso. For whatever reason, he was one of those people who were never called by their first name. While I had never had the pleasure of meeting Alonso's parents (wealthy Argentine aristocrats, according to Magnum), I was willing to bet that they'd also called him Alonso since the moment he emerged from his mother's loins.
Alonso hit the stop button and said, “Okay, now turn to page forty-seven of transcript seven-B and tell me what you think of this.”
OCD and I nodded wearily, and we leaned forward and began thumbing through our four-inch-thick transcripts, while Alonso did the same. Finally, when we were all on page forty-seven, Alonso hit the play button.
All I could hear at first was a low hum, then a crackling sound, and then my own voice, which always sounded strange to me when I heard it on tape. “… the risk is of James Loo smuggling my million dollars overseas,” my voice was saying. “What if he gets stopped at Customs?”
Now came the Chef's voice: “Eh, whaddaya whaddaya? Don't worry about it! He's got his ways, James. All you gotta know is that the money's gonna get there. You give it him, he gives it to his people, and badabeep badabop badaboop… schhhwiitttt”—asharp clap of the Chef's hands!—”it's all done! There's no—”
Alonso hit the stop button and shook his head slowly, as if he were deeply troubled. OCD rolled his eyes, preparing for the pain. I braced myself too. Finally Alonso started muttering, “ Schhhwiitttt—he keeps using this word.” He let out one of his trademark deep, troubled breaths. “I don't get it.”
OCD shook his head and sighed. “We've been through this before, Alonso. It just means ‘that's all she wrote.’ Like, schhhwiitttt!That's all she wrote.” OCD looked at me with desperation in his eyes. “Right?”
“Pretty much,” I said, nodding.
“Ahh, prettymuch,” declared Alonso, raising his finger in vindication, “but not always! Depending on the context it could mean something different.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “Right?”
I nodded slowly, wearily. “Yeah, it could. Sometimes he uses it when he's looking to tie up the loose ends of a cover story. Like, he'll say schhhwiittttto mean: And with that latest phony document we've created, the government will neverbe able to figure things out!’ But most of the time it means just what Greg said.”
Alonso shrugged noncommittally. “And what about the clapping sound? Does that affect the meaning of the schhhwiitttt?”
OCD sagged visibly, like an animal that'd just taken a bullet. “I gotta take a break,” he said, and without another word he left the debriefing room, closing the door gently behind him, muttering something under his breath.
Alonso looked at me and shrugged. “Tough times,” he said.
I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, especially for Gaito. I still can't believe he's taking this to trial. It makes no sense.”
“Nor to me,” he agreed. “I don't think I've ever seena more airtight case than this. It's suicide for Gaito. Someone's giving him some verybad advice.”
“Yeah, like Brennan,” I said. “It's gotta be.”
Alonso shrugged again. “He has something to do with it, I'm sure, but it's gotta be more than that. Ron Fischetti is one of the best defense lawyers in the business, and I can't believe he would let Gaito go through with this just because Brennan told him so. I feel like I'm missing something here. You know what I'm saying?”
I nodded slowly, resisting the urge to tell him what I truly thought—that the Blue-eyed Devil was going to try to bribe one of the jurors. And that was all Gaito needed: one juror to hold out, and then Gleeson would be forced to declare a mistrial.
Of course, I had no proof of this, but stories like this had swirled around the Blue-eyed Devil for years—disappearing files, witnesses recanting testimony, judges making surprise rulings in his favor, prosecutors quitting on the eve of trial. But I kept those thoughts to myself and said, “My guess is that Fischetti is gonna try to focus on me, not the facts. Like, if he can get the jury to trulyhate me or, better yet, to literally despiseme, then they'll acquit on general principles.” I shrugged. “So he's gonna try to paint me as a drug addict, a whoremonger, a compulsive liar, a born cheater— you know, all the good things in life.”