Ice Cap (29 page)

I clicked. At the upper right of the first page was a search box. I typed in “Saline Swaitkowski” and was startled by an immediate hit. I sat up a little in my chair and went to the article.

A much younger, though far more bedraggled and haunted Saline was being escorted by a female police officer toward the open door of a patrol car, with a headline that read
POLICE INVESTIGATE PREMATURE DEATH
. The copy read “The
Carnegie Hill Chronicle
has learned from the NYPD that Joseph C. Vargo, a second-year medical student at New Amsterdam Medical School, has died from an apparent heart attack in his apartment on Eighty-ninth Street, between Lexington and Third Avenue. His death was reported by his girlfriend, fellow student Saline Swaitkowski, who called 911 when he failed to wake up yesterday morning. No cause of death has been determined, though according to Miss Swaitkowski, Mr. Vargo had complained of chest pains, and recently completed a series of tests. Officials at New Amsterdam expressed their deepest sympathy to Mr. Vargo's family, and have granted Miss Swaitkowski an unconditional leave of absence.”

I went back to the
Chronicle
's search box and typed in “Joseph Vargo.” There were two more hits. One described his father traveling up to New York to retrieve his dead son, the other reporting the results of the autopsy.

“The tragedy of Joseph Vargo has been made so by the discovery that headache medication was the cause of his sudden death last Tuesday. Mr. Vargo, a victim of chronic migraine headaches, was also suffering from a rare form of angina that can occur in people in their twenties and thirties. The potent migraine medicine he was taking was specifically prohibited for people with this type of heart condition, especially at the high dosages he'd apparently administered to himself.”

The law school I went to, as a matter of policy, denied the existence of human emotion. In the classrooms and discussion groups in student lounges and faculty receptions, it was all about the clinical application of ascendant ideals over the vulgar preoccupations of flesh-and-blood people actually consumed by the situations thrust upon them. It wasn't until I left those hallowed, insular, and arrogant halls that I appreciated the mission my scattered mind had set upon, and woke every morning glad for it.

What I learned was that the laws we examined and memorized, and the principles upon which English Common Law was based, which in turn spawned our American legal system, accounted for the unpredictability and innately selfish nature of our species. They started with the assumption that emotions drive behavior, what John Maynard Keynes called the animal spirits. It was the academics and clinicians who tried to turn legal theory into soulless, rational calculation.

Consequently, most legal practitioners hadn't the faintest clue what to do with a person like Saline. And their professional equivalents in medicine knew even less. So it was no surprise that the institutions, the mighty system itself, spit her out, as if performing tissue rejection on a foreign body.

For that alone, I grieved for the young Saline, yet another brilliant soul with the curse of differentness, and though my sanity was rarely in doubt, I recognized the plight, identified with the sad conclusions.

*   *   *

Burton called me the next morning, waking me out of a deep sleep, where I was dreaming that Tad's gloomy house had turned into crystalline ice, like the ice palace in
Doctor Zhivago,
and Zina was Julie Christie in a pink velour jumpsuit and white fur hat. I was interrogating her again, but she was speaking Polish, or Russian, and though trying to be honest with me, I couldn't understand a word she said.

I grunted into the phone.

“There's a cheerful hello,” he said.

“First word of the day. Sorry.”

“I'm here in your parking lot. Permission to come upstairs?”

“You're kidding,” I grunted.

“I'm not.”

There's a dilemma. Keep your boss waiting versus greet your boss looking like a corpse with a bad hangover. My soggy brain arrived at a strategy—focus on the hair and face, and stick with a sweatsuit for expedience. And thus I had him up in the office in about five minutes.

“I don't know how people can work out in the morning,” he said as we climbed the stairs. “Though I admire it.”

“Personal discipline,” I said. “In all things. Coffee?”

I cleared a space for him on the sofa and started a pot of my best.

“So what brings you here?” I called from the kitchenette.

“I come bearing gifts.”

“That's so sweet.”

When I got back to the office area I saw him pulling a file folder out of a FedEx box.

“Another case?” I asked.

“Your current case. The private chat-room conversations of Tadzio Buczek and Katarzina Malonowski.”

“No sir.”

“Yes ma'am. The result of a subpoena signed and expedited by the Honorable District Judge Claire Freyberg, to whom we now owe a large favor. Probably have to paint her house or something.”

“Seriously?”

He blanched. “Of course not.”

“No, I mean you got the transcript.”

“We did. Natrafi
ć
.czat.net was unhappy about it, but I had a chat with their lawyer, and here we are.” He handed it to me. “I've barely looked at the text; it's nearly all in English. Will save us the translation time. Nice coffee.”

I apologized for the absence of crumpets and jelly, something you'd have delivered to you at Burton's on a cart. He graciously claimed no interest in such things.

“Since I'm here and all, why not brief me on the case?” he asked.

I'd known Burton long enough to know this wasn't a subtle way of checking up on me, but rather an honest interest in staying informed, mostly to lend advice and possible assistance. As with other fine men, he knew instinctively that the greater the trust he held in you, the harder you'd work to earn it.

So I went through everything that had happened—the sit-down with Ivor Fleming, chasing down Zina's true identity, uncovering Saline's past, and the shootout with Yogi and Boo Boo, along with a discourse on their employers back in Brooklyn. I also showed him the stills of the two goons from my security video. I left out Roger Angstrom of
The New York Times,
for unknown reasons, but floated the theory first put forth by Sam that Ivor Fleming had avoided further prosecution by finding a safer form of illegal activity. He took it all in, then gently probed for conclusions that I didn't have. To distract him from more probing, I talked about the side trip into the Don Pritz case, including the conversations with Dinabandhu Pandey and also Art Montrose, whose standing with Burton I was eager to repair.

“Interesting,” he said. “I wouldn't have known.”

“That's why I'm telling you. Good intentions aside, I think Montrose was wrong. He might have used the best strategy to save Franco from a worse fate, but I don't think Franco was guilty of anything but gullibility. I think it was all a setup by Eliz Pritz. On her part, the perfect crime.”

I ran through the logic of my argument. He then shot it full of holes, in a polite way.

“I know I can't prove anything,” I said, “but I don't have to. The only relevance to me is the restoration of faith.”

“In Franco's innocence.”

“The word ‘innocent' may not quite apply, but he isn't guilty as charged. I can't prove that, either, but I believe it to be true, and that's all that matters.”

“They won't all be innocent,” he said.

“Most aren't. That's why it's so important to save the ones that are. It's the point of it all.”

He got up to go. I thanked him for the transcripts and for everything else that was good about my life and would have gone on from there if he hadn't put his finger to my lips, which gave me a chance to get the brakes on my brain before it drove off the road, which it can do under certain circumstances. So then he left me feeling even more blessedly grateful.

Before tackling the file, I took a shower and downed some coffee, feeling like the impending task called for an alert and unimpeded mind. That was the right choice. A less agile intellect would have assumed the transcripts were of an intimate tête-à-tête between two lonely singles and taken longer to realize it was anything but.

Zina:
 This to acknowledge receipt. Require dates for specific requests per order #3567vsl.

Tad:
  Received order on 5/11. Will need two more weeks to confirm supply. Are stateside agents coordinating with other feeder units? Understand need to know, but should avoid unnecessary duplication.

Zina:
 Understood. Will streamline order. G thanks you for continual quality production.

Tad:
  T thanks him for quality deposits in accounts.

Page after page of the transcripts was more of the same. Routine business transactions, clothed in euphemism and insider code, though the language was far more banal than exotic. I began to jot down patterns, trying to get a sense of what they were writing about. After a while it began to emerge. Tad was a supplier of something, a source. He identified himself as a feeder, and there were other unknown but noncompetitive feeders operating in other territories. Zina was a buyer, though not the end of the trail. People beyond her were defining demand, which flowed through Zina by way of someone named “G.” Between Tad and Zina were other links in the chain, identified only as “stateside agents.”

As a person who had spent countless hours entirely absorbed in complex narratives of Harry's involving the movement of things like endangered animals, two-ton automated machine tools, two-thousand-dollar boxes of saffron, and the occasional single envelope containing a promissory note for a half billion dollars, I knew what I was looking at.

Shipping and handling. Supply-chain management. Import-export. Logistics. An art and science lovingly undertaken by some people, but hardly a romance. Tad and Zina had found a convenient and reasonably safe way to communicate, though precautions were taken. All of which indicated an illicit enterprise, which answered one open question. Tad was dirty. And so was his wife.

Almost involuntarily, I reached for the phone and called Harry.

“Are you ready to take me in?” I asked.

“Happy to be a port in the storm.”

“It's not supposed to start until tonight, but I need to pick your brains.”

“Slim pickins,” he said.

“False modesty is unbecoming.”

“I think that was a compliment.”

“I'm expecting a fire.”

I threw a pair of silk long underwear, wicking socks, and additional fleece sweaters into a big duffel bag, along with other overnight necessities, like the laptop, the nat.net transcripts, Randall's external hard drive, and a spare magazine for the Glock tucked in with the cosmetics. What girl wouldn't?

The sky on the way to Harry's was a sullen dark gray. The temperature had risen in the last twenty-four hours, but the weather commentators ruined that hopeful sign by saying it was the telltale of a southwesterly storm, usually the worst of all.

I turned up the heat and switched the radio to classical music to compensate for all that negativity.

Harry had parked his Volvo facing out toward the road, but I pulled straight in, to better hide the bullet holes. There'd be time to go through all that. He met me halfway to the door and took the heavy bag.

“Should have brought a forklift,” he said, heaving the bag over his shoulder.

“You have one? Wouldn't surprise me.”

As requested, there was a fire in the fireplace. I let Harry help me disgorge the duffel bag, and we settled in the living room in front of the hearth. Then I made him go through Tad and Zina's interactions, hovering over him and interrupting every five minutes with my earnest interpretations. He ignored me, except for an occasional pat on the hip, and read on for almost an hour. Then he relented and looked over at me.

“You're right,” he said. “In every particular.”

I swatted him. “Come on. Tell me the truth.”

“It's a classic distribution channel. Tad is the field agent, charged with acquisition. He funnels what he obtains through intermediaries who either add value to the product or act as go-betweens with some special advantage, like a relationship with port officials, allowing unscrutinized pass-through. From there the merchandise is received somewhere in Europe—if it's Poland, probably in Gda
ń
sk—and then distributed from there. Tad is in direct contact with one of the last links in the chain, so he's either set this whole thing up himself, or he's bypassed his immediate buyer and gained access to the people closer to the end of the line. Usually an unacceptable thing even in the legitimate world, if there is such a thing. Though it sounds like the former. I think he's set something up with this character G and the two of them have worked out the multistep distribution process. Love to know more about it. Looks pretty cool.”

“Cool? What are they trading in?” I asked.

“No idea. Drugs, microchips, nuclear arms, French poodles, wicker furniture … it's all the same in the language of commerce. Merchandise, product, shipping, handling, containers, customs, manifests, ports of call. Stuff that has to move and the stuff that moves it.”

We took a break from analyzing the Tad/Zina interactions to eat lunch and check in on the storm's progress, which seemed to be holding true to earlier predictions, gathering its strength before slamming into the southeast corner of the Middle Atlantic and then heading up our way. The Carolinas were already succumbing to record snowfalls and desperate proclamations that this kind of thing can't happen here. Harry went off to test his generator and check on his business and I went back to poring over the transcripts.