From this side, the door is not concealed, and the electronic lock is released with a simple lever handle. He steps into a room paneled in anigre. The floor is shimmering white quartzite laid in six-by-four-foot slabs instead of cheaper tiles. The receptionist’s desk is a marvel of brushed stainless steel formed into curves, as if it is molten and flowing, with a celadon quartzite top. Eight comfortable chairs are available to accommodate those visitors who will be made to wait long enough to establish that they are of less importance than the man whose counsel they have come here to seek.
Currently, illumination is provided by only a pair of alabaster sconces that flank a door on the far side of the room.
To the left, beyond a wall of glass etched with a cityscape, a conference room waits in shadow—twenty empty chairs around a long table. To the right, windows look out on streets impoverished of light and rich with threat.
Michael steps around the desk and goes to the ensconced door. It opens into the office of Carter Woodbine, founder of Woodbine, Kravitz, Benedetto, and Spackman.
Ordinarily, Woodbine schedules appointments only between ten o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon. On this occasion, however, he isn’t meeting with ordinary clients, and even the great man will bestir himself before dawn when the matter requiring his attention is sufficiently rewarding.
Like the public spaces in this building, Woodbine’s office is an exacting and fastidious marriage of high drama and good taste. The desk is an uncharacteristically large work by Ruhlmann, circa 1932. The lamp upon it is not from Office Depot, but shines forth from the long-ago studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany; the dragonfly motif is a rare specimen executed largely in gold glass with vivid blue insects and no doubt appeals to Woodbine because it suggests mystery and power, the two cloaks in which he’s wrapped himself throughout his career.
Although the attorney owns a fifteen-thousand-square-foot residence on two acres, a half-hour’s drive from his office, he maintains an apartment here on the fifth floor. In addition to a living room, dining room, chef’s kitchen, bedroom, bath, and gym, there is a concealed panic room that can withstand any assault that might be made against it. His third wife, forty-year-old Vanessa, twenty-two years his junior, lives with him in the mansion, but she has no access to his apartment, which she assumes—or pretends to assume—is of modest size and used solely when he’s so overwhelmed by the demands of the law that he can’t spare the time even for a short commute. This allows Woodbine to have a parallel life of quiet but intense debauchery at odds with his public image.
The apartment entrance is concealed in the office paneling, behind a large and excruciatingly pretentious cubist painting that might be by Picasso or Braque—or by a barber who cut their hair. The lock responds to a signal when an electronic key is held to a blue triangle that symbolizes something in the painting; a code reader behind the canvas confirms the signal and releases the lock.
Michael neither has a key nor needs one to finesse the code reader. The door opens, and he enters a small foyer, proceeding from there into the living room.
The apartment security system tracks all occupants by their heat signatures and pinpoints them on a floor plan displayed on a large screen in the panic room. In a crisis, sheltering behind steel plate and concrete, Woodbine would be aware of where each invader could be found, and he would be able to coordinate with a police SWAT team, by phone, to facilitate their efforts to locate the culprits and secure the premises.
Michael is now represented by a blinking red dot on that panic-room display, where at the moment there is no one to see it. Three other signifiers are also blinking.
Although Michael would prefer to be an ordinary man, he is unique by any standard, and no return to a normal life is possible for him. He proceeds.
The three men are gathered at the kitchen island on which packets of hundred-dollar bills are stacked high. The thickness of the packets suggests each contains ten thousand dollars. Together, the ordered piles must amount to at least three or four million. Tall and handsome and white-haired, Carter Woodbine is dressed in a midnight-blue silk robe over matching pajamas. His associates, Rudy Santana and Delman Harris, are fresh from the street, their duffel bag emptied of cash.
They are confident that the building’s security system cannot be breached without triggering an alarm, just as they are certain that no one can know about this meeting.
When Michael steps into the room, the three men’s astonishment is so great as to preclude an immediate reaction. Their heads turn in perfect synchronization, their expressions as ghastly as if he’s someone they murdered and is now risen from the grave, though in fact he is a total stranger to them.
Harris is the first to shrug out of the mesmeric moment. He draws a Heckler & Koch .45 from a shoulder holster under his gray leather sport coat. Rudy Santana’s thigh-length black denim jacket hangs open, and he retrieves a pistol from a hip sheath.
Because Michael has no weapon in hand and enters smiling and appears so self-assured as to be mentally deficient, the thugs are uncertain—hard-eyed and tight-lipped, but at the same time puzzled and wondering if drawing their guns will prove foolish.
Michael says, “I’m unarmed and alone. I prefer to avoid hurting anyone. I just need money. Give me half a million, and you keep the rest.”
A KITCHEN CONVERSATION
If the definition of murder requires that the accused must have squeezed the trigger or thrust the knife or swung the machete, then of the three men gathered around the kitchen island, Rudy Santana is by far the most prodigious perpetrator of homicide among them. If the meaning of murder is expanded to include anyone who finances illegal enterprises that by their nature involve vicious business rivalries and lethal violence, the laurels go to Carter Woodbine. For thirty years, the attorney has provided the seed money for new gangs that splinter from traditional criminal organizations, and he has used his political influence to spare his associates prosecution. He lobbies to keep the southern border of the United States open for the transport of narcotics and to facilitate the human trafficking that ensures a supply of indentured young women for brothels and the tenderest of children for men who yearn to have them.
Even with all the sources of information available to Michael, he isn’t able to attribute a scrupulously exact number of murders to either man. Besides, the total increases without surcease—by the month in Santana’s case, by the week for Woodbine.
The accomplishments of Delman Harris are more easily assessed. Michael is pretty sure that Mr. Harris has committed between seven and ten murders, a fraction of the deaths that can be blamed on either Woodbine or Santana. Perhaps the mere sprinkle of corpses he has left in his wake embarrasses him, leaves him feeling inferior to these other men, which might explain why he, rather than Santana, not only draws his gun but rashly points it at Michael, stiff-armed, finger on the trigger, and demands, “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m nobody.”
Woodbine quietly disagrees. “You’re somebody.”
“I’m not any kind of cop,” Michael assures them.
“He don’t look like nobody’s homeboy,” Santana says.
“Shit,” says Harris, “he looks trick.”