The Fixer

22

Not far from Geometry Partners was the Three Lyres. TheBoston Globe reporters and photographers and editors who frequented the place called it, simply, Liars. The Liars Pub. The Liars Club. The walls were paneled in dark wood and the lighting was low. There were a lot of old pub signs mounted on the walls. The room was dominated by a big, welcoming U-shaped bar.

Monica Kennedy was waiting for him in one of the booths that lined the perimeter of the room. On the wall above the table hung an old Guinness sign of a toucan with a pint balanced on his beak. She had a beer in front of her in a pint glass, some brown ale with a round creamy head. Also an immense blooming onion, deep-fried to a perfect tan, as big and frightening as a sea creature, giving off a slightly rancid aroma.

“You hungry?” she said as Rick slid into the booth. “I’m starved. Missed lunch.”

“I thought you ate at your desk.”

“A yogurt doesn’t count. Flag down the waitress and get yourself a beer.”

She was hunched over the blooming onion, plucking out leaves like a surgeon. Her glasses were smudged, as always. Rick wondered if it ever bothered her, peering through clouded glasses, or if she got used to it, if she preferred it that way. She was wearing a grimy-looking maroon crewneck sweater over an ivory shirt with long collar points that stuck out like a nun’s habit.

“Thanks for meeting me.”

“Are they shutting it down totally?”

“What?”

“Your crappy magazine.”

“Oh. Mostly. It’s going to be online only.”

“Sometimes they say that just to peel off staff.” She produced a small squeeze bottle of nasal decongestant and squirted some into each nostril. Then she sniffed loudly. She was still an Afrin addict, apparently. “I still don’t know why in the hell you quit real reporting to go to that rag.”

“Money, why else?”

She looked up from the onion. She looked surprisingly, touchingly hurt. “But you were good.”

He smiled, shrugged. “Apparently not good enough.”

“What did you think, the Globe could match Mort Ostrow’s offer? Not possible. You were the rising star here. I thought you wanted to be the next Sy Hersh.” She meant the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who reported for The New Yorker, a legend in investigative journalism.

“Anyway, it was time for a change.”

She shook her head, disgusted. “Have some onion.”

“Maybe later.” He managed to get the waitress’s attention and asked for a Sam Adams.

He remembered a time when an ambitious editor had assigned him and a couple of other junior reporters to work with Monica on a team-written Pulitzer-fodder piece about a big chemical company that had been dumping a toxic pesticide, causing a cluster of birth defects in Western Massachusetts. Monica, competitive to the bone, was grudging and ungracious about having to be a “goddamn dog walker.” But when Rick handed her his reporting file, she said, “Huh. Doesn’t entirely suck.” And Rick, realizing this was the highest praise from Monica, glowed.

“So what do you want?” she said.

“You ever come across my dad’s name when you were reporting on the Big Dig?”

“I don’t even know who your dad is.”

“Leonard Hoffman. He was a lawyer.”

She shrugged.

“He had a lot of clients in the Combat Zone.”

She shook her head, turned her palms up.

“He represented strip clubs and various other establishments of the sort.”

“Hey, someone’s gotta do it.”

“Apparently he bought cash from some of them. A lot of cash.”

Her eyes widened and she smiled. Now he had her attention. “Really?”

“You know about this?”

She kept smiling. Her cheeks bunched up and lifted her glasses. She took a long sip of her Guinness. She set it down. “In theory. Wow.”

“What?”

“It’s like you just told me you saw the Loch Ness monster.”

“Meaning what? You don’t believe me?”

“Meaning it’s something I’ve heard of for years and never could prove.”

“Prove what?”

“The cash bank. Long rumored. Never spotted in the wild.”

He raised his eyebrows. “The cash bank?”

“You need cash to pay bribes. No paper trail. But it’s always a problem, how to get your hands on enough cash.” She was nodding quickly, reflexively, examining the head on her beer. She never looked at you when she was thinking hard. She’d look at the floor or the cubicle wall or her (usually chewed) fingernails. “If you’re not a cash business, and who is, anymore?” She made a tally on her fingers. “Convenience stores, restaurants, liquor stores. Parking garages. Nail salons. Back in the heyday of the Combat Zone, strip clubs and adult bookstores, places like that-I mean, talk about cash-intensive businesses. Any idea what quantity we’re talking about?”

At least three point four million, he thought. “I have a feeling it was a lot. You never wrote anything about the cash bank.”

“Look, it’s like this.” She pulled out her Afrin bottle, held it up. “What I know is this.” She shook the bottle, which sounded mostly full. “But what I can print… is this much.” She squeezed a dose into each nostril, snorted. “You remember, or maybe you don’t. Maybe it was too long ago. But you always know a whole hell of a lot more than you can publish. Always. It’s the hellish part of my job.”

“So it’s called the cash bank, huh?”

“Now, that would be a story, Hoffman. If you survived to publish it. Which you might not.”

“‘Survived’?”

“You write about that, you’re messing with some heavy hitters who wouldn’t want it out. You piss them off…” She shook her head.

“What?”

“Put it this way. You piss them off, they’re not just gonna write angry letters to the editor.”