Extraordinary Rendition

33

BY THE TIME BYRON came out of the subway station at nine, the snow had melted from the Manhattan streets and sidewalks, but it still clung to tree branches and the roofs of the low buildings in his neighborhood. He walked quickly along the four blocks between the station and his apartment, frequently touching the inner pocket of his coat and always finding the outline of the disk.

As soon as he entered the lobby of his building, Pedro, the engaging and gregarious doorman with diamond studs glistening in the lobes of his ears, pointed to two people seated in the lobby chairs. One was a man, obviously an Irish plainclothes cop, and the other a woman. She was obviously Puerto Rican. They recognized him.

They each displayed New York City detective shields. Byron felt a rush of anger.

The man said, “I’m Detective Garrity.”

“Garrity? What a surprise. An Irish cop.”

Garrity looked momentarily puzzled. And then he set his expression into a tough game face.

“Sergeant Cruz,” the woman said.

Byron didn’t acknowledge her.

Garrity said, “Simeon Black is dead.”

“Sy Black?” For a moment Byron had that out-of-control feeling that he was about to fall. He took a deep breath. “He’s dead?”

“Yeah,” Garrity said. “Murdered.”

“How do you know that?” Byron hadn’t heard a radio or seen a newspaper since he woke in the quiet of Christina’s bedroom.

“We just left his place. A nine-one-one call came in at five. Our forensic guys are still there.”

“How did this happen?”

“Don’t know for sure. Looks like knives.”

“Jesus,” Byron said. “My God.”

Byron turned away from Garrity. He was upset, profoundly weak, and dizzy. He glanced at Pedro, who was all intense attention but who only knew that the people talking to elegant, friendly, generous Byron Carlos Johnson were cops. Byron didn’t want to fall and didn’t want to dissolve into tears and trembling.

He turned again to Garrity and Cruz. They stared at him. Cruz’s face was round; she had small eyes, painted-on eyebrows, and a faint sprinkling of freckles on her dark cheeks. She said, “Let’s go up to your apartment to talk.”

Byron focused first on the tough-girl Bronx accent and then on her words. “That is not going to happen.”

“Why not?” Garrity asked. “Don’t you want to help?”

Byron said nothing.

Cruz said, “He was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

“I knew him. He is a very famous man. Many people knew him. Go see them.”

“See, the problem, Mr. Johnson,” Garrity said, “is that maybe a million people knew him, but only you are on the security camera in the lobby of his building. The way we see it, you were there about the time he died, maybe a little later, maybe a little before.”

“I visited him often. I’m probably on that security camera twenty times. There are probably fifteen people on the security camera yesterday.”

Garrity said, “Not really, Mr. Johnson. There are the two old gents who live upstairs, and you. And then somebody smashed the camera.”

“I don’t break security cameras. And I don’t harm people.”

“So why,” Cruz said, “don’t you let us come on up? We won’t hurt you.”

“No.”

Garrity asked, “Are you sure?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?”

“It doesn’t help to get fresh with us,” Cruz said.

“No, you’re not coming up. And no, we’re not talking any longer.”

“We’ll come back with a search warrant.”

“Go ahead. I’ll be here. I’m easy to find. You people seem to know where I am all the time, even in the bathroom. In the meantime, have the exits watched to see if I’m leaving with anything.”

“For such a smart man,” Garrity said, “it’s amazing how stupid you are.”

Byron Carlos Johnson was frantic when he reached his apartment. He wanted information about Simeon Black, and at the same time it was harrowing to absorb that the seventy-four-year-old man, whom he had grown to admire, whose apartment had come to feel like a safe refuge to Byron, was dead. Within seconds Byron brought up on his computer screen the online version of the New York Times.

Byron didn’t have to navigate to the obituary page. The news about Simeon Black’s killing was the lead story on the front page, just below an article about chaos in yet another Arab country. The article started with the same who, what, when, where, and how rule that Simeon said was the foundation of his business. “Simeon Black, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, was murdered yesterday in his Greenwich Village apartment. He was 74.”

Byron raced erratically through the long article. There were depictions of Sy’s career. Often ranked with I. F. Stone and David Halberstam as an iconic investigative journalist… His classic book on the secret invasion of Cambodia earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1971… Simeon Herschel Black was born in the Bronx… He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and Harvard… The first Jewish president of the Harvard Crimson… Married and divorced three times…

And there were other passages in Byron’s frenzied reading that arrested his attention. Investigators described the incident as well-planned and not a random break-in… Mr. Black’s computers and notebooks were taken… Several thousand dollars in cash, according to police sources, were left in the apartment… A security camera in the lobby, which had been operating during part of the day, was disabled…

There was a sharply etched black-and-white picture of Simeon Black. Taken in the early seventies, it showed Sy with black horn-rimmed glasses, black hair just slightly overgrown and bushy in the style of the time, in a black suit with narrow lapels. Sy Black could never have known, Byron thought, when the picture was taken or at any other time, that this was the way his life would end. And Byron also thought that Sy Black’s life had ended as it did because he had become a part of it, the messenger who brought death.

Byron had work to do. He reproduced three copies of the disk he had created at Christina’s apartment. He put the three reproduced disks in separate envelopes. He addressed one of the envelopes to himself at his closed house on Monhegan Island in Maine. He addressed another one, with no return address on it, to Judge Justin Goldberg. And he addressed the final envelope to Simeon Black.