In this instance, in the case of Aleem Sutter and his crew, Michael has no compunctions about violating the right they have assumed they possess, the right to kidnap and murder as they choose.
GOING TO SEE THE WIZARD
Durand Calaphas leaves his agency sedan in the restaurant lot to be retrieved later. With the hood of his raincoat providing anonymity, he walks to his meeting. The rear entrance of Woodbine, Kravitz, Benedetto, and Spackman, attorneys and eager financiers of death by heroin and fentanyl, is two blocks away, but he travels five blocks to get there, to prevent traffic cams at intersections capturing an image of a man walking directly from the restaurant to the law offices. The roll-up door is raised, as he was told it would be. Inside, a lean man in black jeans and a black denim jacket worn over a red T-shirt stands beyond the reach of the in-blown rain. As Calaphas arrives, this agitated specimen expresses his impatience with obscenities. His nose is bandaged, bruises extending under his eyes. “Where the hell’s your car? No one said you’d walk in.”
“I had dinner nearby. This kind of weather invigorates me.”
“You was supposed to be here at nine o’clock.”
“Isn’t it nine?” Calaphas asks.
“You’re twenty-five minutes late.”
“Really? That much?”
“You didn’t call or nothin’。”
“Like I said, I was at dinner.”
“You don’t have no watch?”
“A quite good one,” Calaphas says, pulling his coat sleeve up to reveal a gold Rolex. “It was my brother’s. His widow wanted me to have it, to remember him by.”
The man answers that with a hard stare, as if he has killed people for less than being late for an appointment. “You kept us waitin’。”
“After dessert and coffee, I had a good port. You know how it is with port—you want to savor it. You don’t just slug it down.”
Exasperated, the man repeats, “You kept us waitin’。”
“And who might you be?”
“Santana. Woodbine’s bein’ pissed off in his apartment. Harris, too. They been here since eight thirty.”
“Then why are we chatting and making them wait even longer?”
After considering Calaphas in silence for a moment, Santana says, “Somethin’ wrong with you?”
“How do you mean?”
“How do I mean?”
“If you’re asking if I’m ill, the answer is no. If you’re asking if I’ve had too much to drink, I haven’t. But maybe you’re implying something else.”
After another silence, Santana says, “I see you now.”
“Do you?”
“Real clear.”
“Because I could always administer a vision test.”
As Santana goes to a control box mounted on the wall and puts down the big roll-up, Durand considers a glass-walled cubicle with a sign above its door that reads VALET. Against the back wall of that space is a pegboard on which only a few electronic keys hang. As an experienced player, he often notices things that seem mundane but that eventually prove to be essential to a winning strategy.
Santana opens an interior door, and Calaphas follows him into a vestibule.
“Leave your raincoat. Don’t go drippin’ all over the place.”
As they proceed along a hallway toward the lobby at the front of the building, Santana speaks a name and says, “Know who that is?”
“He’s a United States senator.”
Santana mentions another name.
Calaphas says, “Investment fund boss. Oversees trillions.”
The third name is Katherine Ormond-Wattley, the director of the ISA, to whom Calaphas answers if he answers to anyone. “Them three,” Santana says, “is so tight with Woodbine they’re Siamese twins.”
“Four twins.”
“You get what I’m sayin’？”
“With some effort.”
“Get it outta your head how Woodbine’s just some mouthpiece you can keep waitin’ while you have port. I don’t work for no pocket-change pussy. The man is on the ladder, not just on it, high up.”
“Good for him. Good for you. Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a long day, that’s all.”
Although of a style different from that of seventeenth-century France, the lobby rivals the Hall of Mirrors in the palace at Versailles as an effort to impress on commoners that he who resides here has pockets deeper than the sea.
The elevator is accessed with a code that Santana enters in a keypad. The cab rises in silence, so smoothly that they don’t seem to be moving.
“Respect gotta be paid,” Santana says.
“I won’t embarrass you,” Calaphas assures him.
This will be a far more interesting meeting than Calaphas has expected. That understanding comes to him not as a premonition; it has become his considered intention to make it interesting.
VIEWPOINTS
Sometimes, Aleem is too enthusiastic for his own good. He knows this. He is profoundly self-aware. He is a get-it-done guy who has no patience for the hindrances of the world. The worst hindrances are people, and he has killed more of them than he should have. He doesn’t regret excessive murder or think it is immoral. Nothing is immoral unless you believe it is, and even if you believe something is immoral, you’re wrong. That’s Aleem Sutter’s philosophy. When he admits to having killed more people than he should have, he’s only acknowledging that sometimes offing a treacherous buttface isn’t worth the risk involved. If he better managed his enthusiasm, he would on some occasions do nothing more than cripple the dude for life or, if the hindrance loves his mother, Aleem would be better advised to just disfigure the bitch and threaten to waste her to keep her little mama’s boy in line. The ecstasy, the overpowering exaltation, of shooting an adversary in the face or spilling his guts on his shoes can, if Aleem’s not careful, spin quickly into a frenzy, such delirious excitement that he might make a big mistake. He knows that he must guard against healthy enthusiasm deteriorating into frenzy. He is more self-aware than anyone he has ever known.
At the moment, as he urges Kuba to ram the Explorer, he knows that his anger at Nina has swollen into rage and that rage can sour enthusiasm into the most violent and least wise of intentions. But what he feels is not his fault. She’s making him this way. She takes the boy and runs, and then she doesn’t just give up at the roadblock like she ought to, and now she’s forcing them to chase her through this zombie forest. It’s as if, right in front of his homeys, she keeps telling him that she’s going to cut his pecker off, or as if she thinks she has essentially already cut it off, humiliating him.
She makes the situation even worse by handling the Explorer as if she went to some Hollywood school for stunt driving and graduated at the top of her class. Except for clipping the right rear fender on a tree trunk, she’s pumping that four-wheel so expertly that Kuba not only is failing to catch up with her, he’s beginning to fall farther behind.
“Don’t let this happen,” Aleem warns.
“Everythin’ is everythin’， boss.”
Everything isn’t all right, and the fact that Kuba calls him “boss” is proof that the ass-kisser knows it.