Sweat (15 page)

He turned off his office lights, teasing the final remains of AWARE protesters and news crews who had been watching his office from the ground like a crowd waiting for a jumper on a ledge. Senator Day, hat on his head, strolled to the elevators on the opposite side of the building, body swaying down the long corridor. A lone senate page passed and gave his best “Good night, Senator,” salutation, before stifling a laugh. The senator didn't acknowledge the snicker. He was making his first attempt to move past the day's misadventure. The longer he dwelled on it, the longer it would be news. You don't make it to the Senate without thick skin, a silver tongue, spells of temporary amnesia, and multiple personalities.

Senator Day rode the elevator to the basement and walked to the underground sidewalk that ran like a maze throughout the Capitol complex and its surrounding buildings. The senator eyed the small train that ran parallel to the underground walkway, a toy used to shuttle voting senators to the Capitol in comfort. The train was serious business when it was in use, but parked in the hall without any passengers it looked like an enlarged version of a child's amusement park ride. It was not a perk limited to the Senate; the House had its own choo-choo too, bought and maintained with taxpayers' money, of course.

The senator took three underground tunnels and exited a small door on the north side of the Capitol Building. He stepped into the empty street and hailed a cab. Twenty minutes later, he paid his tab in the alley that ran behind his Georgetown home and walked across the backyard and into his house.

The honorable senator sat completely motionless on the foot of the bed, his wife asleep with her head under the pillow. He held his own head in his hands. The image he spent his life trying to portray now dangerously teetering on the cliff of disaster—a cliff named Wei Ling. The years of education, proper upbringing, and the sacrifice of the family lineage that came before him climaxed in one thought that the senator said aloud. “Fuck.”

It was the best he could do.

For the first time since his car had broken down in South Central L.A., the senator was scared. But politics were on his side. He was from Massachusetts, historically one of the friendliest states to morally questionable acts by their governing representatives. His mind raced between desperation and hope, ego and humility. His life was on the line—his wife, his job, his ambition. “Nice job, John,” the senator said to himself. “Two and a half decades of hard work, thrown out the window on a third-world sweatshop skank.”

The goateed man with a penchant for positive camera angles and the lion's share of a recently cashed fifteen-thousand-dollar paycheck, chatted with the off-duty stewardess at Club Iota in Arlington. A local acoustic husband-and-wife team was packing up their guitars after an early weeknight show that had the bar half-full. The bartender cleaned glasses and hit the remote control for the small TV in the corner of the enclosed drink-mixing workspace. With the TV news in one ear, the man with the goatee tried his best to impress the stewardess, his goal to say whatever it took to get her down the street and into the bedroom of his new condo.

With the stewardess playing coy, the cameraman looked at the news on the TV and spoke involuntarily. “Look at this asshole.”

“Who?” the stewardess asked.

“Senator Day. I filmed a documentary for him last month.” So what if it wasn't a full-fledged documentary. No one was there to call bullshit on him.

The stewardess warmed up considerably and put her hand on the cameraman's knee. They both watched the story and the bartender turned up the sound.

The cameraman chuckled.

“What are you laughing at?” the stewardess asked, her arm moving to his shoulder.

“It's just fitting. You have Senator Day defending himself against an Asian Rights Group a month after going to Asia to film a documentary on Human Rights and Overseas Labor.”

“Why is that funny?”

“Honey, that's between me, him, and the rest of the poor souls at the Ritz he kept up all night.”

The cameraman asked for the check and pointed to the stewardess to indicate he was covering her bill as well. “You want to see a copy of the documentary? I live right down the street. I have the whole thing on DVD,” he said getting off his stool.

“Okay. But just the documentary. Nothing else.”

“Of course,” the cameraman replied, the muscles in the corner of his mouth fighting to suppress a smile.

The ride from Logan Airport to Boston's North End was a manageable twenty minutes. Before “The Big Dig,” a construction project aimed at putting the city's freeways underground, the city was a rush-hour maze with no way out. But with the completion of the most expensive engineering project ever undertaken by man, Boston had once again become a charming big city. The streets were less crowded, the air was cleaner, the city quieter. Sure, Beantown was one major underground accident away from a total transportation hose-up, but for now the Big Dig was finally showing results after years of budget overruns and broken promises. The senator looked at the skyline of Boston, deep in thought. Home. It has its advantages.

A few blocks northeast of Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market lies the North End, Boston's version of Little Italy. In a city dominated by Irish immigrants, the Italians, backed with guns and pasta, had made their niche. Small Italian shops lined Hanover Street and pockmarked the surrounding neighborhoods. Mom and Pop establishments sold everything from cannoli to ice cream, pasta to seafood, wine to cheese. English was optional, and you got a discount if the owner knew your family or liked your face. Two blocks away, the North Church marked the edge of the cultural enclave and the beginning of Paul Revere's famous “the British are coming” gallop through Boston and the history books.

As the senator drove past the statue of Paul Revere, he thought about the luxury of having advanced warning. He needed a Paul Revere. Someone to tell him when he was being ambushed.
One if by land, two if by sea, three if you are being blackmailed by an unscrupulous sweatshop owner.

The Gelodini family had occupied the corner of Hanover and Prince Streets since the first barrel of tea was thrown overboard into Boston Harbor to protest British-imposed taxes. The Gelodinis came to the country carrying a few suitcases of clothes and a proud lineage of carpenters and bricklayers. Hard workers with big appetites to go with even bigger personalities. The love of food and the propensity for engaging conversation was the impetus for a change to the Gelodinis's chosen profession. For four generations the hammers and spades had been gathering dust as antiques in the attic, the family tools replaced with spatulas and pasta makers.

Michael Gelodini, a short Italian with a harsh Sicilian-rooted Bostonian accent, gave the senator a firm handshake and led him down a narrow hall and up a flight of stairs to a private dining room in the back of the restaurant.

”Your guest is waiting,” said the current patriarch of the Gelodini family.

“Thank you,” the senator replied.

“I will be taking care of you personally, Senator. Shall I get you a bottle of wine?”

“Please. A decent red.”

“We have a nice 1999 Chianti Classico.”

“Perfect.”

The senator entered the room and Michael Gelodini disappeared. The senator's guest was seated at one end of table, facing the door. It was a habit that had kept him alive on more than one occasion. Some lessons are learned the hard way, and the scar across the middle of the guest's neck illustrated the point.

“Senator.”

“DiMarco, I assume,” the senator replied.

“Yes. And that is the first and last time you will address me by name.” His dark soulless eyes combined with his black hair and the scar on his neck to give the impression that the inside of the man matched the intimidating exterior.

Neither man moved to extend the other a handshake. The senator, eyeing a man he would only meet once, pulled out a chair and sat down, sitting diagonally across the table from his guest.

“Nice restaurant. I don't make it to the North End much. I'm from Southie,” DiMarco said proudly.

“An Italian from Southie.”

“There are plenty of true bloods in Southie. Somebody has to keep tabs on the Irish. You know we have Italian restaurants in Southie, too. Good ones.”

The senator smiled. He liked people from Boston. “This place is discreet without being dangerous, physically or politically. I'm a United States Senator. I can't risk being seen getting out of a car in Southie or Jamaica Plain or Roxbury. Here, if someone happens to see me, no one will think twice.”

“Whatever. You're picking up the check.”

Finding DiMarco had taken the senator exactly one phone call to his father. Edward Day III had provided his son, through DNA, with the brains, the looks, and the inherent instinct to survive at all costs. He shared his son's ambition. He wanted nothing more than to be the father of the President. If his son would only learn how to use a condom.

“Where can I find the individuals in question?” DiMarco asked over a steaming plate of mussels on the table.

“Saipan.”

“Just where the hell is that?”

The senator gave DiMarco a brief geography lesson. Vincent DiMarco listened and nodded.

“You have pictures of these acquaintances of yours?”

“No,” the senator lied. He sure as hell wasn't about to hand over the pictures he did have.

DiMarco, dark eyes staring at the senator, thought for a moment. “One hundred thousand before I start. Another one hundred thousand when the job is done. Plus fifty thousand for expenses.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “I deal in cash, and I don't start until I receive the first payment. This is the address where you can deliver the money. There is a door on the second floor in the back. Someone will answer. Here is a phone number where you can reach me. Don't use my name. I am the only one who will answer at that number, so you don't have to go asking for me. If I don't answer, don't leave a message. If I need to contact you, I will do so from a public phone or I will use an untraceable prepaid phone.”

“Agreed,” the senator answered. “It will take me a couple of days to get the cash.”

“Fine. Like I said, I will be waiting. Once I receive the payment, I will start. When I finish, I will contact you and you will deliver the second payment to another address I will identify later.”

“Fine.”

“Now what can you tell me about your acquaintances?”

The senator liked the sound of the word “acquaintance.” “My first acquaintance is a man by the name of Lee Chang, owner of a sweatshop operating under the name Chang Industries. My second acquaintance is a girl named Wei Ling who works at the sweatshop.” The senator pointed to an address from a corner of his old itinerary to the island. “Here's the address of the sweatshop—it should be easy to find. Saipan is not a big island.”

“Well, nothing is as easy as it sounds. I'll have to do some surveillance and pick my spot. It'll take a week. Maybe less, maybe more.”

“The sooner, the better.”

“Any preference?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are a lot of ways to get injured in this world. I mean, I'll take what I can get as far as the opportunity goes, but I try to accommodate my client's request.”

Senator Day looked around the empty private dining room as if he expected the FBI to come busting through the door. “I'm not sure what you are saying,” the senator answered coyly. “But if I had a choice of how
I
would like to die,
I
would prefer it be an accident.”

“I'll see what I can do. I think I can rule out the use of a firearm. I'm not about to fly to some foreign country with a gun in my bag.”

“It's not a foreign country. Saipan is a U.S. territory.”

“Well, just the same. Taking a gun on an airplane, even a gun with a proper license, is not in our best interest.” DiMarco didn't bother telling the senator that he preferred knives. They did the job, left fewer clues if you took the weapon with you, and they were silent. Every musician has their favorite instrument and DiMarco's were stainless steel, heavily weighted, razor sharp blades made by an old codger in Toledo, Spain.

The senator nodded and said nothing.

Mr. Gelodini entered with a fresh basket of bread and filled the senator's wine glass. Vincent DiMarco stood and straightened his jacket.

“Michael, my guest can't stay for dinner. Would you please see him out?”

“Certainly, sir. Will the senator still be dining with us this evening?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Very well.”

Michael Gelodini led Vincent DiMarco through the kitchen and out the side door to an alley beside the restaurant. The metal door shut and darkness surrounded DiMarco like a comfortable jacket. With quarter of a million dollars on his income horizon, DiMarco looked down the alley in both directions. To the left he could see the lights of Hanover Street silhouetting patrons as they shuffled down the sidewalk. DiMarco turned away from the light and vanished into the night.

Marilyn opened her eyes as the morning sun peaked through a crack in the curtains. For the third night in a row, she had spent more time staring at the dark ceiling than she had at the back of her eyelids. The fax that had poured into the office earlier in the week had forced her to reflect on the last twenty years of her life, something she had managed to avoid through self-therapy and good old-fashioned medication. Admitting that she was the cause of Jake's parent's divorce, combined with the plight of a seamstress named Wei Ling, sent her tail-spinning into a level of depression she hadn't visited in years. She rolled over, got out of bed in her nightgown, and downed two Valium and a Zoloft with her morning espresso.

An hour later, she grabbed a seat on the crowded Metro and cautiously circled job possibilities from the employment page, looking over her shoulder as she rode the subway six stops on the red line. At the office, she made travel plans, took phone calls, and shifted around a never-ending carousel of meetings and appointments, dinners, and lunches. She brewed coffee for her boss as soon as she knew he was on the floor and served it with one spoonful of real sugar, stirred well. But for the first time in her life, she was looking at other job alternatives, scanning the opportunities available to a forty-five-year-old secretary with no educational background.

Reeling from guilt, she asked Jake to lunch—an offer which he politely declined. Marilyn's third offer to buy him a drink after work was finally, grudgingly, accepted. She didn't want to leave anything unsaid. She didn't want Jake to have any questions about the past. He was going to be burdened for life by the truth she had already spilled. She was going to apologize again, try to explain the unexplainable, and act like an adult for once in her life, even if it killed her.

Jake got out of a late evening meeting, a conference call with an Indonesian firm looking to import a new generator for an offshore, wind-power venture. He had prolonged the meeting as long as he could by peppering the international team with an inordinate number of questions. In the back of his mind, he hoped Marilyn wouldn't be waiting when he finished. Luck wasn't on his side.

The waiter led Jake and Marilyn to a two-seater booth in a shaded corner of The Dark Room, an appropriately named hole in the basement of an old office building five blocks from Winthrop Enterprises.

The waiter gave the young man and the older woman the usual look. Boy toys for the city's wealthy and lonely wives were an old sport, and a few establishments in Georgetown survived on such clientele alone.

Marilyn grabbed the red menu with the gold edge and flipped to the cocktails. Jake, uncomfortable, looked around the bar.

“Your friend Al is a little out there.”

“He can help.”

“He said he would, but not without giving me the first degree.”

“He is a very smart man. Don't let the mental breakdown fool you.”

“Did you know the guy used to work in intelligence?”

“I know he worked for the government.”

“And my father?”

“You need to ask Al about that. I wasn't involved.”

“What's his story?

“It's a long one.”

“I don't have to be anywhere for a couple of hours,” Jake responded, kinder than he needed to be.

“He lost his wife and son a few years back.”

“How?”

“Remember the Air Egypt flight that crashed off the coast of Nantucket twenty-five minutes after take-off?”

“Sure I remember. They suspect the pilot nose-dived the plane into the sea intentionally.”

“It gives me chills just thinking about it.”

“His family was on the plane?”

“Yes,” Marilyn said fading away momentarily. “His wife was a Japanese lady named Miyuki. From the pictures I have seen, she was quite beautiful. And their son was just adorable. An eight-year-old Indiana Jones. Loved archeology. After the accident, Al moved out of his family's house in Bethesda. There were just too many faces staring at him as he walked the halls, too many voices calling to him from the corners of the rooms. Too many memories. His brother moved into the house and Al moved into my apartment complex. I recognized him from meetings with your father years before, and we became friends. As it turns out, his move to the apartment was only a first step toward reclusion. One day he decided he had had enough. He left his apartment, fully furnished, and moved out to live on the streets. I used to come by and check on him, bring him clothes and food. So did his brother. But after a while he refused to accept things. Said he was getting by just fine and that there were plenty of others who needed help worse than he did.”

“Pretty drastic.”

“There was more to it than just a plane crash. He was supposed to be on the plane. He was called back to the office on his way to the airport. He put his wife and son on the plane by themselves and was going to catch a flight out the next morning. He was planning to take his son to see the Pyramids.”

“Jesus,” Jake said.

“Yeah, he felt responsible. Guilt does things to people that are hard to explain.”

Chow Ying smoked his almond-flavored cigarettes and sipped his Tsingtao beer, close enough to smell Marilyn's Liz Claiborne perfume. He hummed a traditional Chinese song he had heard the old man who ran the hotel sing the night before. Between verses, he listened to the conversation over his shoulder. The woman cried twice, for reasons God only knew. Chow Ying couldn't care less. He was there for one purpose, to get closer to Peter Winthrop.

“So what did Al say?” Marilyn asked as she finished her third apology in as many drinks, changing the subject back to a more comfortable and less personal topic.

“He said he would look into it. Told me to come back in a couple of days.”

“I am sure he will help.”

“We shall see,” Jake replied. “The whole thing is crazy.”

Chow Ying leaned back to hear the near-whispers of the two behind him. When the young man started ranting emphatically about helping a pregnant girl in Saipan, Chow Ying's eyes bulged and he almost blew a load of beer on the table. The fun-loving, wise-cracking, opera-singing Chinese mountain swallowed his beer, threw his cigarette into the ashtray still lit, and flipped the switch on his mental mood to business mode. And the only business Chow Ying had on this trip to the States was filling coffins. He had everything but the price of the casket picked out for the two behind him.

The waiter handed the check to Jake who paid for drinks against Marilyn's weak protest. Employment did have its advantages, even if it was employment for your father under growing suspicion. He folded a fifty in the leather bound receipt holder and left it in the middle of the table.

Jake walked with Marilyn until the subway station was across the street. He said good-bye at the light and raised his hand to flag a cab. Kate was supposed to meet him at his apartment at eleven after her shift of riding ambulances, a part-time job perfecting her emergency medical skills. The thought of Kate, perhaps still dressed in her doctor-like scrubs, was all the reason he needed to get home, and pronto. Their relationship was still torrid. They tore each other's clothes off every chance they got, and he now had enough shirts and ties at her house to get to work without looking like he'd slept in the gutter.

Jake unsuccessfully tried to hail two cabs before the third one, a handicap-accessible, Red Top minivan, stopped. Chow Ying was twenty yards away, peering into the reflection of the closed window fronts. He bought time by acting as if he were making a withdrawal at the ATM. He watched Jake get into the cab, and eyed Marilyn as she stood on the corner waiting for the light to change.

They were splitting up.

The light moved from red to green as Jake shut the sliding door on the cab. Marilyn stepped off the curb and the heel on her red Nine West shoes caught in the gutter grate, snapping like a twig. Miraculously, the heel remained attached to the shoe, dangling by a strip of leather.

Jake watched out the back window of the cab as Marilyn limped her way across the street. The taxi driver cleared his throat and waited for directions from his fare. As Jake turned his head away from Marilyn and back toward the driver, he looked directly into the eyes of Chow Ying just outside the cab window. No more than ten feet away, Chow Ying stared at Jake with an intent that went beyond any casual glare. The eye lock lasted until Jake gave the driver his address and the cab pulled away from the curb and headed down the street.

Marilyn limped her way to the Metro station, trying to walk with her weight forward on the balls of her feet. Chow Ying turned his attention from the cab, looked over at Marilyn, and smiled. Women are the same everywhere, he thought. Fashion over function. Any man would have just ripped the dangling heel off. Marilyn, single and heading downhill toward fifty, wiggled her body as if she were having spasms, all in an effort to hide the broken heel. It was an act wasted on an empty sidewalk.

The McPherson Square Metro entrance disappears under the corner of a nameless glass and concrete office building with the roman letters MCXI written over the front door. Chow Ying, almost salivating, followed Marilyn across the street, closing on his prey. He looked in both directions as Marilyn approached the subway station entrance and then saw his opportunity. He took two large steps forward and as Marilyn turned to step onto the escalator, he shoved his hand under her armpit and sent her body upward and outward. Gravity did the rest. She bounced hard once on the moving steel stairs with a gruesome thud. Her body continued down in a mass of flailing arms and legs, the movement of the escalator keeping her in motion until the stairs flattened out two hundred feet below. The D.C. subway system boasts some of the longest escalators in the world, and Marilyn hit more than half of the three hundred steps on her way down. Her body lay at the bottom, the contents of her pocketbook and the dislodged broken left heel of her shoe spinning at the edge of the escalator like a boat caught in circular rapids near a dam.

The call to the rescue squad came two minutes after Marilyn's body reached its resting place. It took the genius station manager behind the security glass another full minute to make his way across the tile floor and push the emergency stop button on the escalator. Marilyn's body was a medical school extra-credit project. Gross cuts mixed with deep gashes. Blood pooled on the floor and on the stairs of the escalator, creating a shiny, sticky ooze. Marilyn would never walk again. Never breathe. Never move.

Detective Earl Wallace said goodnight to his wife on his cell phone and took his foot off the accelerator. His wife of thirty years wasn't going to wait up, and he was in no hurry to play matchmaker between the living room sofa and his backside. One hand on the wheel of his black unmarked police cruiser, he fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, found his favorite vice, and shoved it between his lips.

Detective Wallace had seen it all in his twenty-two years on the force. From the gangland slayings of the projects that were a weekend ritual, to the white-collar company employee who tried to kill his co-workers with doses of poison sprinkled on the powdered donuts. On any given night, Detective Wallace knew he would see the worst side of society, the dark side most people prefer to think exists only in movies and TV dramas. After a bad night, the real miracle came the next morning—when he woke up, got dressed, and prepared for another day of the same.

His first case in the homicide and robbery division set the tone for a career that he lived, breathed, and somehow loved. They say the first kill is the hardest for soldiers, and Wallace was sure he would take to the grave the image of the victim in his first case.

Twenty-two years later, the case was as fresh as yesterday. At first, no one had noticed the sleeping passenger in the back seat. For two hours the double-door white Metrobus made its scheduled stops along Route 2B. At some point during an otherwise lovely autumn afternoon, an elderly passenger made his way up the aisle of the bus and whispered in the driver's ear. The driver pulled over, walked to the back of the bus, and then turned to make a brief announcement. The uniformed driver spoke softly in an attempt to keep everyone calm. When he finished explaining the situation, the passengers flew from their seats and clawed their way off the vehicle, one on top of another. It was the natural human reaction to riding with a corpse.

Detective Wallace arrived on the scene, made his way to the back of the bus, and swallowed hard at the painful expression frozen on the dead man's face. An empty garbage bag lay crumpled at the feet of the slumping young man.

Wallace searched the body for evidence and identification. There were no visible wounds to the man's face or chest. The driver's license in the wallet indicated the victim was only twenty-seven, youthful for a heart attack, but not impossibly young. Wallace patted down the body one last time and pulled out an identification badge from the victim's shirt pocket that nearly made his own heart stop. According to the laminated blue ID with the victim's photograph, the dead young man worked in the reptile house of the Washington Zoo. Detective Wallace, relying on intuition as much as real detective work, radioed to the dispatcher who in turn called the dead man's employer. When Wallace heard the dispatcher's response, he jumped off the floor of the bus and climbed on the top of the seats to the vehicle's rear exit.

Two Russell's vipers, stolen from the zoo earlier in the day by the employee, had chosen the local transportation system to make their escape. The Russell's vipers—referred to by Vietnam vets as “two-step” snakes due to the fact that once bitten, the victim took two steps and died—had sunk their fangs into the hand of their captor when he opened the bag to check on them. The young man died without the courtesy of his allotted two paces.

It was a manhunt the likes of which had never been seen in the downtown area of a major city. A small family of Mongoose was released near the bus, as if the snake-killing rodent hunted its prey like a bloodhound. Poisons and traps were thrown around like rice at a wedding. In the end, the snakes were never found. To this day, Earl Wallace looked around his tiny back yard before letting his grandchildren run free. Twenty-two years and forty pounds ago. His short curly black hair was now heavy with gray, giving the detective a distinguished look to his black features. Twenty-two years.