Extraordinary Rendition

28

BYRON CARLOS JOHNSON TOUCHED Christina’s face, amazed as always at her skin’s softness.

“Your friend Special Agent Nashatka came to see me.”

They were in the Athens coffee shop on West 113th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The noisy and convivial place was filled with Columbia students. The steamy air was redolent with the odor of hamburgers and french fries and the faint scent of black coffee. Across Amsterdam Avenue was the immense and unfinished mass of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Against its Gothic front doors, homeless men and women had set up a cardboard village.

“What did he want?”

“To tell me I had become a rich man.”

Christina loved his playful moods. In the months they had been together, the reserved Byron-the Byron whose formal tension she had sensed when she approached him in the Central Park Zoo at the SpencerBlake summer party-had evolved into a man who made her laugh.

“How so?”

“It was my Michael Anthony moment.”

“Michael who?”

“Michael Anthony. In the 1950s, long before you were born, there was a television series called The Millionaire. Every week a very rich man, John Beresford Tipton, would call Michael Anthony into his library and give him the name of a man or woman on whom he wanted to bestow a million dollars, a fortune then. Mr. Tipton, a recluse, would hand a check for the million to Mike. Mike would smile at Mr. Tipton, slip the check into his suit jacket, and go out to find the lucky and totally unsuspecting man or woman who was to become the next millionaire. Mr. Tipton had an almost sadistic interest in seeing how a million dollars would screw up someone’s life. And Mike Anthony was the cordial emissary who delivered the check. The lives of the lucky winners never turned out well.”

Trying to smile, Christina sipped cold water from a plastic, brown-hued glass. “And so did he give you a million dollars?”

“Fifty-two million.”

“Say that again, Byron,” she said, “it’s a little too noisy in here.”

“Fifty-two. Actually, a little bit more.”

She blessed him with one of her smiles. At that moment, he was startled, as he often was, by how beautiful she was and how much he loved her.

“Is this a joke?”

“No, that’s what he said.”

“What did you do?”

“I have only three banks where I keep accounts. I called them. It turns out there are people I’ve never heard of called relationship managers. My calls got routed to them. I never spoke to any of them before. I never knew I needed a relationship manager.”

She paused as a waiter in a white shirt, open at the neck, deftly poured coffee for them. “That must have been awkward,” she said. “What did you ask: ‘Do I have fifty-two million dollars in my account today? I have some cell phone bills I need to pay.’”

“In all three cases, I was told the accounts had been closed, frozen. Late yesterday. When I asked why, they said I would have to talk to the bank’s lawyers. I did. Each of them said the banks had been served with forfeiture orders.”

She looked bewildered and concerned. “Forfeiture orders?”

“The accounts were seized. When I asked to see the orders they said they no longer had them. They said agents showed them the orders, waited as they read them, and wouldn’t let them make copies. Once they saw the orders they closed down the accounts.”

“Did fifty-two million dollars go into one of the accounts?”

“They refused to let me know that.”

She leaned forward. Her face was grave. “Carlos, what’s going on?”

Voices and the laughter of the young swept the room. These were happy kids, he thought, remembering the austere dining halls of his years as a student at Groton and Princeton. Nothing but men, all in ties, button-down Brooks Brothers shirts, and blue blazers. Everything orderly, subdued, cowed. No gay boys (at least none who acknowledged it), two blacks, few Jews. This was so different. It was so much more vital and vibrant and happy.

“There was once an expression I never used when I was in college, but I think about now. They’re fucking with my head.”

“We still use that, Carlos. It transcends generations.” She paused, sipping more water. He detected an ever-so-slight tremor in her hand. “You need help. You need a lawyer of your own, don’t you think? You’re in a labyrinth. Everything is twisted. You stay on straight paths. Those straight paths are leading to walls and no exits. You’re hitting walls. You need to adapt. You need a guide.”

“You mean as in Virgil and Dante?

“Don’t joke, Carlos. You’re way too cool for your own good.”

Byron reached out for her hand. He held it. “You’re wrong. I’m scared out of my wits, Christina. Don’t you think I understand that I was in a world, just six months ago, in which I was denied nothing, as untouchable as Prince Valiant? Now I wake up every morning in stark raving dread.”

She looked straight into his eyes. He thought about the many times he was so close to her face as they made love that he could see in her brown eyes the reflection of his own.

“Is that why you’re up at five?”

“If I try to stay in bed, as I did for years knowing I’d drift back to sleep for another peaceful whole hour or so, I get racing, bad thoughts about my future. I get up now as quickly as I can, believing that being awake will ease the fears.”

Again, she tried to drink water but only wet her lips. “What fears, Carlos? Talk to me.”

“Such as losing everything I have.”

“What else?”

“Having yet another hateful news story about me show up in the Post and then instantly get etched forever in that great tablet for all ages, the Internet.”

“Tell me more.”

He hesitated. When he touched the cup of lukewarm coffee, his thumb was shaking. He doubted he could lift the heavy ceramic cup without that shaking becoming obvious to her. He didn’t want to let Christina see that. He knew that at this stage in his life, and with this woman, it was pointless to hide his weaknesses. But he still lived by the aristocratic instincts for privacy and surface calmness his father had instilled in him. Hold it together, son. Hold it together. It was as though his father, in those few times in Byron’s childhood and teenage years when they were actually together, had decided to communicate advice to him derived from the cold-water, bracing ethics of English boarding schools in the nineteenth century. Maybe it was that reserve that had enabled his father to compose thoughtful, perfectly grammatical orders for murder.

Byron was in free-fall, and knew it. He said, “Sure, there is more, Christina. How about being indicted? These visits from Nashatka aren’t background checks for my Supreme Court nomination. They’re meant to unsettle me, in fact to scare the shit out of me.” He smiled. “And you know what? They’re working. I’ve got the message.”

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

“Wrong? I don’t think so. I’ve thought for years that a sense of realism was one of my most useful personal assets. This is what is. I built a career out of that one sentence, clients came to me because I had the capacity-at least they and I thought I had it-to see reality. Now very little in the world I live in seems real, but I’ve got enough connection still to that lifelong sense of reality to recognize what all the signs around me mean.”

The same waiter stood near them, raising a glass carafe of steaming coffee, the silent gesture asking, “More?”

“No thanks,” Byron said. “Do you want more, sweetie?”

She shook her head.

Byron said, “Check, please, sir.”

The hairy-chested Greek waiter took the check out of his shirt pocket and set it upright on the table between a salt shaker and a slender glass vase containing three plastic roses.

She took her scarf from the back of her chair and gracefully draped it over her shoulders. “Look at me, Carlos. In the face.”

He did.

“How can I help you?”

His words surprised him, but not her. “Stay with me.”