Known to Evil

35

I was already taxiing my way toward the federal detention center when Breland called and said that I had been granted permission to visit the prisoner.

The so-called holding facility was on the seventh floor of a building that had once been a warehouse. Instead of bars there was thick metal grating over every door and window-laced with razor wire along the seams.

The first person I met was a brown woman with a skinny body and a huge round face. She was standing on the opposite side of a small, iron-latticed window that was set toward the left side of a large wall. The waiting room, where I was standing, was nearly empty. The only other applicant was an Arab woman, surrounded by three small children. She was slumped in a chair. The feeling she radiated was that of intense hopelessness.

"Can I help you?" the bureaucrat asked through the haze of crisscrossed metal.

"Leonid McGill for Ron Sharkey."

"Purpose of visit?"

"His lawyer sent me."

Name? Occupation? Relationship to inmate? Citizenship? Weapons? Other contraband? (This was followed by a long list of everything from cash to chewing gum.)

"Any and all actions, comments, and utterances may be recorded while you are here," she said when the list was through.

Utterances?

"But I represent his lawyer," I said.

"If you do not wish to continue we can stop the process here."

"No," I said. "You can knock yourselves out recording me. Just remember my left profile is my good side."

The brown woman-who had short, straightened hair-almost smiled.

"Have a seat, Mr. McGill," she said. "You'll be called in the order this application has been filed."

The morose Arab woman didn't seem to want to commiserate, so I sat five metal chairs away from her and her oppressed children-waiting my place in a line of two.

Seventeen minutes later a man's voice said, "McGill."

The woman had yet to be called.

I looked around and saw that a door-sized panel to my right had slid open. After a moment that might have seemed like hesitation I stood up and went through the makeshift doorway.

The hall was short, ending at a larger-than-normal metal door replete with a metal screen window.

A man stood on the other side of that door.

"I'm Agent Galsworthy. How can I help you?" a tall white man in a gray-green suit asked me. His eyes were the color of lemons and pecans, giving the impression of small, dusky oranges. He was slender and should have been tall except for the fact that he was a little stooped over, which was odd because he wasn't a day over forty.

"McGill for Sharkey," I said.

"How did you know he was here?" the official asked through the grating. He was my own personal antagonist-confessor.

"His lawyer."

"Who's that?"

"Breland Lewis."

"What's your relationship with the prisoner?"

"His lawyer-Breland Lewis."

It was then that I detected a strong smell of human sweat on the air.

"What is your connection to the prisoner?"

"Can I just say ditto, or is there some reason I got to say the same words over and over?" I asked.

Galsworthy was like the cop in front of Wanda Soa's building; he thought that an evil stare would break me down to jelly. But he was just another bean counter. The only difference was that he counted skulls instead of legumes.

I smiled politely.

"What do you do for Sharkey's lawyer?"

I have learned over the years that you never give a lawman or a bureaucrat any more information than they ask for. If you do, they get confused, and then they get angry.

"You aren't on the visitors list," the pen-pusher told me.

"Lewis said that he called."

"The call has to be followed by a fax."

"You're telling me that he didn't send the fax?"

"We check the machine every three hours."

"And so I have to wait until that time is up and someone looks?"

"That will be after visiting hours are over."

"So what are you telling me?"

"Procedure," Galsworthy said, as if I were a dog trying to understand the true intentions of the man who called himself my master.

"Thomas," another voice said.

Through the haze of metal crosshatching came a broad man in a slate suit with the jacket open, his shirted belly hanging out. This man was in law enforcement. I could only hope that he had more power than the hunched-over inquisitor.

"Yes?" Galsworthy said to the new arrival.

"Let Mr. McGill in."

"We haven't received the fax yet."

The slightly disheveled man took a key from his pocket and approached the door that separated us.

"I have to finish the paperwork before you can allow him to enter," Galsworthy complained.

"You go do that, Tom. Mr. McGill and me will be in my office."

While speaking, the cop, whatever kind of cop he was, unlocked the door and swung it inward.

"Stop!" Galsworthy shouted.

Heads shot up at desks in the small office behind the two men. Two uniformed federal officers came in through a door with hands on their holstered pistols.

I stepped across the threshold as the pudgy cop held up his hands for the guards.

"No problem," he said to everybody but Thomas Galsworthy. "Just a question of jurisdiction."

The uniforms sighed and went back to their office. The heads went back down, and the cop offered me a welcoming hand.

"Jake Plumb," he said. "I'm in charge of the Sharkey case. Don't pay any attention to Tom here. It's his job to make sure that nobody ever gets in to visit their clients and loved ones. He's kept one poor woman and her kids outside for the past three weeks. Her husband isn't even here anymore, but the rules are we can't say that he's been shuttled down to the deportation detention center in Miami. Ain't that right, Tom?"

Agent Galsworthy sneered in silence.

"What do you do, Mr. McGill?" Plumb asked me.

Jake was three inches taller than I but his loose girth made him seem a bit shorter.

"PI," I said, "here to see, as you already seem to know, Ron Sharkey."

"Come on down to my little office, Mr. PI. I'd like to talk to you before you get in to see the junkie."

Thomas Galsworthy stared at us with what he must have thought was an evil gaze. But he kept silent, I guessed, because of having been humiliated by the way Jake had usurped his power in the office. The fat federal cop was moving toward another caged door. He used his key on that and we moved into a darker, more sinister area of the detainment center. We passed through three more locked doors until we came to a long aisle of nine-by-nine-by-nine cages designed to hold men for days, weeks, months, and sometimes for years; these prisoners were black men and brown ones, some Asians, and a sprinkling of whites.

These prisoners were silent and for the most part motionless. They had been defeated by a system so vast and unresponsive, so utterly powerful, that only suicide could counter the weight of it. The hall smelled powerfully of stagnant manhood, the longtime suffering of the guilty, the innocent, and those who just did not belong.

I followed behind Jake Plumb, gazing into the metal crevices. Some men stared out at me with red-rimmed brown-veined eyes, not hopefully but just for a momentary diversion in a life of deadly dull monotony. Madness and cancer, bloodletting and revolution grew like fungus in rooms such as these. I could feel the ghost of my father urging those souls to prepare to tear down those cages, that building, the whole city if they had to.

I wondered if Jake Plumb felt any of what I sensed.

"Right through here, Mr. PI," he said.

We'd come to a solid steel door with a fingerprint-activated lock on the side. I couldn't help but imagine the men we'd just passed hacking off Plumb's hand and using it, the blood still warm, to pop that lock in their bid for freedom-or revenge.

HIS WINDOWLESS OFFICE WAS small, and much neater than I'd expected. Even though we were on the seventh floor it felt to me like an OCD bunker in a lull between bombings.

Plumb's face was flat and wide like a bulldog's but his eyes were Chihuahua-like in their relative size and brightness. His smile was almost a frown.

"So," he said.

We were seated across from each other in this sepulchral workspace.

I didn't reply to the ambiguous beginning of the informal interrogation.

"What do you want with Mr. Sharkey?" he asked.

"His lawyer believes in his innocence and does not think he should be here under federal jurisdiction. The car wasn't his, he didn't cross state lines, he didn't have the keys to the trunk on him, and there's no evidence of him ever having been involved in illegal gun sales."

Plumb's glittery little eyes flared for me.

"Terrorism," he said.

"Come on, Agent Plumb. You yourself called Ron a junkie."

" 'Ron'?"

"I like to get personal with the people I try to help. There's not the slightest bit of evidence that Ron had anything to do with terrorists or terrorism. You're more of a terrorist than he could ever be."

That last sentence came unbidden from me.

"What?" he said. It was definitely a threat.

"What you got out there, man?" I said. "Haitians and Dominicans, Moroccans, Syrians, and Palestinians? If they're lucky you'll send them home. If they're unlucky you'll send them home in five years. It doesn't matter what they did, but whatever it is, when they leave here they'll hate me because I'm a citizen of a country that treated them like nothing.

"All Ron Sharkey did was take a joyride. You, on the other hand, got your fist shoved up the ass of every man comes through here."

I couldn't believe what I was saying. These were certainly my father's words. I don't even know if I believed them.

Surprisingly, Jake Plumb smiled.

"Kinda sensitive for a PI, ain't you, Leonid?"

"Bad day," I said, manufacturing a wry grin.

"Your lawyer's client had six semiautomatic weapons that had been altered to fully automatic bundled in his trunk," the federal agent told me. "We think that he knows something about it. We're sure that he does. I don't care about him, or you for that matter. All I want is a name. Because with that I can get out of this shithole and have a job in a proper office doing work I can be proud of."

There was a whole chapter squashed down into those few sentences, things about Jake Plumb that I would never know. But that didn't matter. He was giving me an opportunity, and I was intent on taking it.

"I'm here to secure Ron's freedom," I said. "I will do my best to achieve that end. If that means getting a name for you, I will try my utmost."

The bulldog snarled a smile that made me doubt he had ever been happy a day in his life.