Seven Grams of Lead (2 page)

Canning had indeed learned of “Uncle Joe’s remedy” while serving in Moscow.

The blogger was a loose end.

Two months later,
the FBI closed the investigative stage of the Sokolov case.

That’s Public-Relations-ese for “hit a dead end,”
Thornton tapped onto his keyboard. The development was no surprise to him. The Bureau’s success rate in bringing killers to justice was just 62 percent, a number inflated by cases in which the killers confessed from the get-go. He intended to add that to his column when his phone rang, the caller ID flashing
JOHNSON
,
JANE
. He knew no one by that name, but his sources often used prepaid disposable cells, and when entering the minimal user info required, they chose ordinary names. Which made sense. If you’re trying to duck the National Security Agency, you don’t input
LINCOLN
,
ABE
.

Thornton answered, “Newsroom”—also known as his spare bedroom/office—and, for the first time in ten years, he heard Catherine Peretti’s voice.

As if it had been only a day or two, she said, “Hey, I’m going to be in town today and I’ve been craving Grumpy. Any chance you can do dinner at eight?”

He leaned his desk chair back and gazed out the window. The dry cleaner downstairs was just opening, illuminating cobblestones on the still-dark West Village block. A call this early wasn’t unusual—everyone knew Thornton always got to work before sunrise, catching up on the world events he’d missed during his four or five hours in bed. Callers from his past were also routine: media coverage was a commodity. It was Peretti’s choice of venue that gave him pause.

Grumpy
was her nickname for Gam Pei, a Chinatown restaurant usually filled with tourists. Anyone who lived in Manhattan knew that you could get good Chinese food just about anywhere in the city—except Chinatown. Gam Pei was especially bad, as Peretti had told him when he first took her there on a dinner date. At the time he was captivated by the Chinese mob, and Gam Pei’s front windows offered a singular view of an overt triad hangout called the Goat Club.

The seventh time Thornton took Peretti to Gam Pei for dinner, he watched a taxi pull up to the opposite curb. As he had been anticipating, a Goat Club goon handed an envelope to the passenger, whom
Thornton recognized as the judge presiding over the trial of two triad members accused of gunning down a fruit-stand proprietor late with her protection payment. Thornton broke the resulting corruption story on his (then) tiny site. The same story reappeared the next day on the front page of every tristate paper.

Peretti applauded Thornton’s professional success.
Grumpy
derived from her personal sentiments after a year of dating him. Before leaving his apartment that morning, she said, “I want a boyfriend who’s interested in romantic bistros, or Burger Kings even, so long as I’m his focal point.”

That was the last time he’d heard from her.

But not of her. She was a comer on Capitol Hill, having soared from intern to chief of staff to California senator Gordon Langlind, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She might have a tip now, and it would be a big one given the clandestine means of contact.

Thornton was curious. And, as usual, he had no evening plans—neither the invitation to the Cuban consulate cocktail party nor the Broadway opening had held as much appeal as staying home and fishing for stories online. But he usually ran the other way from stories involving people he knew outside his professional life. Ethics aside, best-case, your friend is pleased with her quotes along with your copy
and
your editor’s “enhancements.” Which would be a first in the history of journalism. The norm was blowback.

Still, he couldn’t ignore the reason Peretti was
calling him. She knew the deal with journalists and their friends and family, let alone ex-lovers. And she interacted daily with legions of journalists who were none of the above, at media outlets compared to which
RealStory
, a quarter of a million readers notwithstanding, was a flyer left on a windshield.

She was in trouble.

“Love to,” he told her.

At 7:39, Thornton
climbed out of the Canal Street subway station, close enough to Chinatown that he could smell the salty fish—residents left it on the rooftops to dry in the sun, he’d read somewhere. He soon pushed through the heavy, ersatz bronze door and entered Gam Pei, a dark tunnel after neon-happy Mott Street. As his eyes acclimated, he made out the red and white harlequin floor tiles and the twelve-foot-high pressed-tin ceiling. While adding ambiance, the paucity of light helped hide the wear on the furniture as well as what appeared to be soy sauce splattered on the ceiling.

He had his pick of swivel stools at the bar. He sat facing the octogenarian bartender;
Billy
was stitched onto his cream-colored tuxedo shirt, its collar several sizes too large for his neck.

“What you have tonight, sir?” Billy asked in a thick Mandarin accent. Guangzhou, Thornton would have bet.

Thornton studied the beer list and ordered one he’d never heard of. “I was wondering how soy sauce could have gotten all the way up there,” he added, indicating the ceiling panel above the corner booth.

Billy looked up, then shrugged—the way actors used to at the vaudeville theater on East 12th Street.

“I know about the shooting,” Thornton ventured.

Billy’s eyes widened. “How?”

You just told me, Thornton thought. “Blood dries black as a result of hemolysis.”

Glancing around the bar, Billy muttered, “You cop?”

“No, but I write about them sometimes.”

“Well, no story here, mister.”

Thornton smiled. “Sometimes a stain is just a stain?”

“Right, stain just stain.” Billy’s forced laugh revealed four gaps where there ought to have been teeth. Not that bad, Thornton thought. When he wrote about CIA dentists pulling officers’ molars and replacing them with cyanide-filled replicas for use in case of capture, he happened on the statistic that adults in the United States were missing 3.28 teeth on average.

While the old man searched the refrigerator, Thornton fixated on the black starburst on the ceiling, flipping through his mental Rolodex of triad sources
until he inhaled a trace of lavender. He turned to find Catherine Peretti on the next stool.

“Just like old times,” she said, pushing a tendril of dark brown hair back from her face and grinning.

He felt admonishment, but it quickly yielded to wonder. She was as beautiful as ever, her gray eyes blazing with whimsy to match full lips curved at the ends like a bow, poised to break into a laugh at the slightest provocation. Her snug jeans said she still ran daily, and that it was worth it. How in the hell had he ever taken his eyes off her for wannabe mafiosos?

“So how was your decade?” he asked.

“Eventful. I got married and had two kids, for starters.”

Eight years ago, he’d read, with a sense of loss, the
Times
announcement of her wedding to a star at a white-hot hedge fund.

“Congrats,” he said with manufactured enthusiasm.

“Girls Emily and Sabrina, six and eight, husband Richard, forty.”

Peretti peeled off her suede jacket and knit cap, and Thornton processed the changes. There were shadows under her eyes, and she was no longer a blonde. Also, back in the day, if one of her hairs fell any way but ruler straight, you noticed, if only because she smoothed it at once.

“Outside of work,” she continued, “my decade has consisted of helping with homework, watching ballet,
watching gymnastics, watching swimming, and listening to attempts at piano. On occasion, I’ve had time to floss. How about you?”

“I had a second date recently.”

“It’s comforting to know there are some constants in the world.”

He sat straighter and said, “One change worth noting is that now, given the choice, I would have taken you somewhere else for dinner.”

“Is the Goat Club yesterday’s news?”

“It was replaced by a dress shop, actually. Also the Kkangpae is the mob du jour. The reason I would have gone somewhere else is I know of about two hundred restaurants you might like.”

She smiled. “Actually, I’m not here for the food, not that I’d ever come here for the food—” She cut herself off as the big entry door swung inward. Taking in the new arrivals, a senior couple who looked to have come straight from a bingo game in Peoria, she was clearly relieved, but nothing close to calm.

He stilled her hand with his, but the wedding band was a red light. He quickly let go, saying, “Let me know if I’m imagining any of this: You called me on a disposable cell, you used an alias, you came in disguise, and now you’re worried you were tailed.”

She took a deep breath. “Last night, I was running around the park in Potomac when one of your standard preppy neighborhood dads in a Gore-Tex jogging suit pulled even with me and said, very cordially,
that my family and I would have ‘major difficulties’ unless I forgot what I’d just learned at work. And I have every intention of forgetting it, but first I need you on the story.”

Thornton felt a familiar jolt. As well as anyone, journalists understand the fisherman’s maxim:
The tug is the drug.
In this instance, the buzz was doused by his awareness that it would be in both of their best interests for him to hand off the story to someone else.

“Between the mobs and law enforcement, there are probably as many microphones in this place as in Nashville,” he said. “We should go somewhere else after all.”

Exiting the restaurant, Thornton pulled out his phone’s battery so that his position couldn’t be determined from cell tower data. So many of his sources insisted on this, it was practically a habit.

“Where’s Jane Johnson’s phone?” he asked.

Peretti walked alongside him, head lowered as if against a storm, though the night remained temperate. “Last seen in the trash in the ladies’ room in the Bethesda Kmart.”

“And your regular phone?”

“On a train headed for Florida.”

“Lucky phone.” Thornton led the way up Mott, passing the first two available taxis—just in case—before flagging a third heading west on Prince.

He directed the driver to the Lower East Side via a succession of left turns.

“The chance of anyone who’s not a tail staying with us for three consecutive left turns is astronomical,” he told Peretti.

“You’ve picked up some spook, haven’t you?”

“What I’ve learned about tails can be summed up with
T-E-D-D
: Someone who’s seen repeatedly over
time
, in different
environments
, and over
distance
, or who displays poor
demeanor.
Surveillants are easier to spot than you might think.”

“How?”

“Sometimes they have no good reason for being where they are. Sometimes they even use hand signals to communicate with teammates. The hitch is the other times, when there’s only imperceptible surveillant behavior, the sort I would sense rather than see—if I had that ability. So in answer to your question, I’ve picked up enough spook to get me in trouble.”

“That’s comforting.” Peretti’s laughter was interrupted by a screech of tires. A Verizon service van was rounding the corner behind them. Too sharply.

Feigning interest in a billboard, Thornton tried but couldn’t see into the van through the brightly colored blur of lights reflected on its windows.

When the taxi took the next left, onto East Broadway, the van continued down the Bowery. Peretti regarded Thornton plaintively.

“It’s eight-fifteen,” he said. “It was probably just a Verizon service guy in a rush to get a customer who’d been told to be home between noon and eight.”

But he couldn’t discount the possibility that the Verizon guy was really someone other than a Verizon guy who had just handed the taxi off to a teammate in another vehicle. So he had the driver continue all the way down to Wall Street, which at eight-thirty was almost a ghost town by New York standards.

Thornton and Peretti got out at Water Street while the cab idled at a stoplight. He scanned the haze of exhaust for anyone else disembarking. There was no one. Or, rather, no one as far as he could tell.

He led her a block east to Pier 11, where the urban thrum dimmed. “Getting on a boat is another good way to tell if you’re being followed,” he said. “A tail probably couldn’t get people to the other side of the river before we got there, so he’d be forced to stay with us.” He indicated the esplanade, where a handful of late commuters were hurrying to one of the mammoth Staten Island ferries.

The sour smell of the East River was nearly overwhelming as he and Peretti ascended the gangway, which branched into three separate entrances. He directed her to the door on the left, then trailed her into the main cabin.

Just one passenger boarded after them, a thirtyish Hispanic man, ironically unique in that none of his plain features stood out—a Yankees jacket was
his only distinguishing trait. If you passed him on the street ten minutes from now and he’d changed into a Mets jacket, Thornton thought, you probably wouldn’t recognize him.

The man opted for the door to the right, leading to the ship’s upper level, but when Thornton and Peretti took two of the five hundred molded plastic seats on the main level, there he was, directly across the deck, on a bench beneath one of the ubiquitous Lucite-encased posters advertising bedbug extermination services.

Leaning close to Thornton, Peretti said, “I’m not sure, but I think he was on the subway I took from Penn Station.”

Thornton felt a chill creep up the back of his neck. He snuck a look at the man’s reflection in a window. Nose buried in a tabloid. A foghorn announced the ferry’s departure, making it impossible for him to hear anything else, even if he had a directional mic concealed in the newspaper.

“Let’s save our scheduled discussion for the Au Bon Pain in the St. George terminal,” Thornton whispered to Peretti. The Staten Island side’s morph of traditional French café and McDonald’s did brisk business at mealtimes but transacted little more than the odd cup of decaf this late. Anyone following them there would be easy to spot.