Extraordinary Rendition

25

CHRISTINA ROSARIO WAS A strong runner. In the months during which she had been Byron Carlos Johnson’s lover, she had brought him time and again on long runs in Riverside Park, on the footpath’s curving lanes overlooking the Hudson River, in the beautiful arteries of roadways in Central Park, and sometimes as far upriver as the looming George Washington Bridge.

Christina wasn’t surprised that Byron quickly evolved into a strong and effortless runner. He had played squash for years in the upper floors of the University Club, that old-world bastion of privilege at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, and he had stamina, grace, and strength even though he had never been a dedicated runner.

And the runs with her were fun. Byron often said to her, “Get ahead of me. I love watching your beautiful ass.” They had developed a custom of stopping at the Boat House when they ran in Central Park. They would order hot chocolates and take them to the iron chairs on the flagstone plaza overlooking the lake or sit on the massive granite boulder in front of the building as they watched other runners, roller-bladers, cyclists, and walkers moving on the slopes of East Drive.

The November sunlight glinted on the surface of the reservoir. After their stop at the Boat House, they ran on the cinder path that encircled the reservoir. The path was more than a mile long. Byron remembered the reservoir and the cinder path from his early teens, when he had lived for a year with his mother’s sister in her Park Avenue apartment while his father was on a mission to Saigon, before the war began its grim escalation.

Byron later learned that his father for that year had been temporarily assigned to the CIA from the State Department and had prepared secret reports that Byron saw for the first time in the late 1990s, when the government had suddenly released all classified material from the Vietnam era. In those meticulously written reports, typed on onion-skin on a Smith-Corona, his father had detailed the assassinations of Vietnamese suspected of working for the Vietminh and the Viet Cong. They were called action reports or after-action reports, depending on whether they described events that had already happened or were planned.

Byron was profoundly disturbed. There were descriptions of South Vietnamese politicians and military officers who were considered “impediments to success of the mission” and details of how they were to be killed. His father had written reports on villages whose populations were to be relocated because the villages were “impaired.” There were “scenarios” for the bombing of North Vietnamese targets. At the bottom of each report-each written with the precision and clarity that set the tone for everything his father did and said-his father’s signature was unmistakable, even though Byron had wished they were unsigned so that he could deny to himself that his father had prepared them. Byron was a man who understood the logic of evidence: this evidence showed that his father was a murderer just as certainly as a Mafia don who ordered a hit. Byron, after reading those reports, had burned them. But he could only burn and eradicate his own copies. The reports were in the public domain. Recent books on the history of Vietnam mentioned the reports and his father. The reports were described as what they were-“testaments to and plans for murder.” Even the generally flattering biography of his father on Wikipedia had been altered to identify him as one of the profoundly misguided “best and brightest” who had callously manufactured and mismanaged that insane, useless war.

But Byron didn’t want to think about his father now. All that mayhem and intrigue was decades earlier, and his father was dead. Even on a cold day, the air over the reservoir was warm in the early afternoon sunlight. Above the reservoir three seagulls, widely separated, rose and descended on invisible currents of wind; they were absolutely white against the bluest possible sky.

Byron and Christina stood against the low railing that encircled the reservoir; it had replaced the dreary chain-link fence that had surrounded the reservoir for many years. Suddenly, she said, “Carlos, some guy stopped me today. He asked questions about you.”

Byron glanced down from the point in the sky where one of the seagulls floated on extended wings. A speck of dazzling white against absolute blue. He looked into Christina’s face. “So tell me about it.”

“I’m worried.”

“Maybe I’ll be, too. But I can’t be until I know more.”

Runners swept behind them on the cinderblock path. They heard the strained breathing and the pounding of feet. “Let’s walk, Carlos.”

“Come on, Brighteyes. You sound as though you had a visitation from the golem.”

“I was leaving Low Library. Halfway down the steps, a big blond guy said, ‘Ms. Rosario.’ We were right next to the alma mater statue. I stopped. ‘Can I help you?’ I said. I used that haughty voice.”

“I know that voice.” Byron, sensing her anxiety, was trying to put her at ease. But he, too, was anxious.

“He said, ‘I need to speak to you about Byron Johnson.’ I walked quickly. I said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ He didn’t go away. We were walking toward the gates on Broadway. He said you were the target of a grand jury investigation. And that I was a person of interest, a subject. He told me it was very likely you would be indicted.”

Even though he showed his instinctive stoicism, Byron sensed that surge of fear and anxiety that made his knees feel as if they had lost their bone structure and muscle: they melted.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “Who was this guy?”

“A strange name. Nashatka. Special Agent Nashatka. He seemed to enjoy the sound of his name. He gave me his card.”

To steady himself, he took her hand. They were in the shadow of one of the three stone pump houses, built during the Civil War, that stood at the reservoir’s edge. He placed his free hand against the cool, gray, ancient stone blocks. “He must have said something else.”

“Sure, that I would have to testify to the grand jury.”

“Did he say when?”

“At that point he handed me a grand jury subpoena. I left it at the apartment. Soon. I have to go soon. Next Thursday, I think.”

They turned and left the reservoir. As they approached the bridle path, two elegant riders, a man and a woman, galloped by on big horses. Their hooves thundered, the air vibrated as they passed. Huge, intense animals.

“What should I do, Carlos?”

“You’re a law student. You know the answer. You have to go.”

“Why shouldn’t I take the Fifth and not answer?”

He put his arm around her waist. She was still sweating from their run. She was so close to him that he could smell the residue of sweat mixed with the faint scent of perfume. He said, “Because you haven’t done anything wrong. You can’t take the Fifth unless you have a reason to believe your answer will incriminate you.”

She hesitated. “What about the money, Carlos?”

“Money?”

“He asked if you kept large amounts of cash.”

“Don’t I wish.”

“He asked if I could get copies of your bank statements, brokerage accounts, receipts for safe deposit boxes.”

He laughed. “I’ll pull them together for you so you can give them to him. He’ll see I’m fast running out of money.”

“Carlos, I’m worried. Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

“And not to me either, Christina.”

They left the park at West 86th Street and Central Park West. Streams of yellow taxis flowed uptown and downtown on the avenue, using all four lanes. In front of them, the monumental canyon formed by the rows of apartment buildings on 86th Street ran west to the Hudson. Now that they had left the park, the afternoon air seemed to have turned more chill. The beautiful skin of Christina’s right arm was suddenly prickly. Byron rubbed her arm, as if to warm her.

“Let’s grab a taxi,” Byron said. “It’s too far to run back home.”

In the loose rear seat of the old taxi, Byron slid close to her. He took her hand, which had been resting on the cracked vinyl of the seat cushion. A bright panel with a television screen was embedded in the back of the front seat, an innovation of the city’s corporate mayor that must have earned millions of dollars for whatever company made these devices and installed them. The screen had bright graphics. A local news reporter was talking, a montage of soldiers in Afghanistan behind him. They were American soldiers dressed in what looked to Byron like space suits-goggles, miner’s lights on their helmets, bulky bulletproof vests that made them resemble puffed-up action figures, all that technological apparatus.

Ahead of them were the rows of traffic lights leading uptown along Central Park West. There were mothers with their young children on the sidewalks. Runners jogged across the avenue into and out of the park. Bright banners advertising the Museum of Natural History hung from the lamp poles. To their right were the tall walls of granite that underlay the northern reaches of the park. The granite walls were coal-colored.

“Christina, we don’t need to stay together. You don’t need all this in your life.”

The taxi turned left off Central Park West at 96th Street. Just as it completed the sweeping turn, a car decorated with Puerto Rican flags made a U-turn across the four lanes of the street just in front of them. The taxi slowed abruptly, and Byron instinctively put out his arm to brace his hand against the partition and with his other arm kept Christina from jolting forward. Byron glanced at the taxi driver’s license taped to the partition. His name was Ali Hussein.

As they settled back into the seat, Christina, without looking at him, said, “I can’t do that, Carlos. I love you.”

Those words from this beautiful young woman-this woman with whom he could lie awake late into the night talking about books, the day’s events, the movies they regularly went to see, and the years he had passed as a boy moving from country to country-caused a rush of hot emotion to course through his body and mind.

“I love you, too.”

Christina squeezed his hand. He leaned against her and kissed the salty skin on her shoulder.