“That’s a lot of progress in ten years,” I said.
“He was already brokering peace deals between rival gangs from the joint,” Sam said. “Wrote a children’s book about the ills of gang life, and someone tried to get him nominated for a Nobel Prize. President Clinton mentioned him in a speech.”
“While he was in prison?”
“I told you, Mikey, the guy is bulletproof now. He’s made a complete change in his life. A standard-bearer for the good that prison can do for a guy.”
“Just so I’m clear,” I said, “they executed the guy who founded the Crips, right?”
“Eduardo wasn’t up on murder charges,” Sam said. “They had him on RICO charges-a lot of them-but he didn’t have a single conviction on violent crimes.”
“He got sentenced to fifty years for RICO?”
“Latin Emperors are a worldwide organization, Mikey,” Sam said. “And he was near the top of the chain. By the time he got into prison, he was the top guy in Miami. So he might have been calling shots, but no one ever was able to trace them back to him.”
I shook my head. “That can’t be,” I said. “Remember that thing we did in El Salvador in 1994?”
“With the tanks?”
“No,” I said, “the other thing.”
“Oh… with the Russians?”
“No,” I said. “I forgot about that. No, the other thing.”
“The urban renewal?”
“Yes. He was involved with that. He was the top of the pyramid. Even from prison, he was the guy making the calls.”
“Mikey, that was a covert operation. Even if he was involved, what we did in El Salvador didn’t actually happen.”
“So your guy says he’s a hundred percent legit?”
“It’s not just my guy,” Sam said. “Eduardo Santiago is known around the world for the work he does, Mike. This is a guy who is making a difference, which is a lot more than I can say for you and me.”
It seemed hard to believe that a guy like Eduardo Santiago could be completely rehabilitated, but everything Sam said seemed to indicate it was true. Which I guess is why people go to prison.
“I’m still having a hard time with the fact that he got thirty-five years clipped off of his sentence,” I said.
“He’s got influential friends,” Sam said. “Or he snitched out the right guy.”
“Or a combination of both,” I said.
“And what’s so wrong with snitching?” Sam asked. “He found the Lord and stopped covering for the cowards he ran with. That’s good behavior right there.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “You want to come with me tomorrow?”
“No can do, Mikey,” Sam said. “I’ve got a big date.”
“Really?”
“No,” Sam said. “I just thought I’d see what you’d say when I told you I couldn’t come. You want Chuck Finley for this?”
“I think Sam Axe will do just fine,” I said.
Our waiter came by then and dropped off our dinners-veal Milanese for Sam, fettuccini Alfredo with the sauce on the side for me, so, essentially, just a plate of noodles-and regarded the growing scale of Sam’s empty bottle collection. “Anything else to drink, sir?” the waiter asked.
“Whatever else you have,” Sam said.
When building a fortress, it’s important to understand the message you want to send. The White House, for instance, was built with the understanding that people visiting it for the first time would be awed by the size and scale and thus would feel awed by the size and scale of the American government. Your fortress tells unwelcome visitors who you are, what you’re made of and, likely, what you’re willing to risk to protect yourself.
It used to be that you could walk right up to the front door of the White House and ask to pet Calvin Coolidge’s dog. Now, in many Miami neighborhoods, you’re stopped at a gate by an out-of-work cop who demands a DNA sample before you’re allowed inside. And yet Eduardo Santiago’s fortress projected no such audacity. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a college campus. A very small college, and one filled with tatted-up ex-gangsters sitting under trees, but a college no less.
“I didn’t know they still had trees in this part of town,” Sam said. We were a few blocks from the Orange Bowl, just off of Northwest Fourth Street, in an area mostly surrounded by stucco warehouses, three-story apartment complexes and small houses behind chain-link fences. In comparison, Eduardo’s church and the buildings for Honrado were bunched around a bucolic expanse of green grass, towering shade trees and discreet water features. There were picnic tables and Adirondack chairs placed seemingly at random in different areas, though it had a designer’s touch for what randomness should be, hallmarked by the fact that the chairs and tables were bolted onto concrete slabs. It was still Miami, after all.
There were seven buildings in all and each was a modern steel-and-glass structure, even the church. There wasn’t a spot of graffiti anywhere, nor was there any visible security. The adults and kids who sat on the grass and walked between the buildings looked tough from afar, which is to say that they looked like they thought they looked tough, but really just looked like they’d been terribly misguided at some point. Who walks with a limp when they don’t need to?
For the most part, however, everyone wore clothes that fit and most of the men, women, girls and boys wore identical gray polo shirts with the logo for Honrado Incorporated on the left breast pocket. If you want to build an army, the first thing you need to do is get them into uniform. This is true if you’re in the marines or if you’re in the Bloods. People like to feel like they belong to something larger than themselves, and even here, at a business run by a church, those rules still applied.
“What was this place before it was this?” I asked.
Sam looked around. “Nothing. That would be my guess.”
“Five acres of nothing?”
“Sure wasn’t a great, big park with Adirondack chairs.”
“No,” I said, “I would have remembered that.”
“Seems to me I remember parking here before football games. It was one of those vacant blacktop lots that some industrious soul decided to sit in front of with a sign offering parking for five bucks less than at the stadium.”
“This couldn’t have been cheap to renovate,” I said.
We made our way across the lawn to the church’s administrative offices. Double doors opened into a rounded portico where a young woman with a headset on sat behind a small desk. Unlike the young women who had the same job at the hotels along South Beach or the busy offices in Coconut Grove, this woman had a ragged scar that stretched from the corner of her right eye, crossed over her nose and continued all the way over her left cheek and down across her jawline. It was rippled and red and maybe half an inch wide. It was unmistakable: Someone had slashed her face with a razor blade.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“We’re here to see Eduardo,” I stopped myself, considered the surroundings, and then corrected, “Father Eduardo.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I said, “but he’s expecting me. Tell him his friend from the car wash is here.”
The girl touched her ear and spoke into the headset. “Father Santiago? Your friend from the car wash is here. Would you like me to take them to the conference room? Yes, no problem, Father.” The girl tapped her ear again and smiled up at us. “Father Santiago is running a few minutes behind schedule. He says he’ll be right out to see you in a moment. Can I get you something to drink while you wait?”
“What do you have in a bottle?” Sam asked.
“Evian or Dasani,” she said.
“He’ll have Evian,” I said before Sam could answer.
“No problem,” she said. She slid a clipboard toward me and asked me to sign in, which I did. Except that I said my name was Napoleon Solo, because I thought it prudent not to have my name on the official visitor’s list of any organization. I handed the clipboard to Sam. He signed it Illya Kuryakin and handed it back to the girl, who then proceeded to not even bother to look at it, which Sam clearly viewed as a shame. The girl then got up and walked down the narrow hall to her left, and I saw that her scar actually stretched around her neck, too.
Sam and I sat down in the lobby, and a few moments later, the girl returned with our waters.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
Immediately, the girl’s hand flared up toward the scar on her face. “Sure,” she said, though I could tell she felt uneasy. “I get asked questions all the time.”
“Do you like working here?” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Do you like your job here? Has it been good for you to work here?”
“Working for Father Santiago is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” she said.
I looked at Sam to see if he was gloating, but he was too busy trying to figure out the twist top of his water.
“How long have you been here?”
“A year. Maybe a little more. Soon as I got out, Father Santiago told me I could work for him.”
Got out. So comfortable telling a stranger she’d done time. “Where were you?”
“Homestead,” she said. “You ever been there?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s south of here. It wasn’t so bad. You know. It was actually safer for me. Crazy, right?”
“Crazy,” I said. “How old are you?”
“You don’t ask a lady that,” Sam said, which made the girl smile. “You ask how young they are, right?”
“Twenty-three,” she said. “But I feel older.”
“You look like a million bucks,” Sam said.
The girl touched her scar. She was pretty, you could see that, even with the gouge across her face and neck. “Father Santiago says that I could get plastic surgery for this. What do you think?”
“You could,” I said. I pointed at the scar under my left eye. “I was going to get this fixed, but I decided it gave me character. Something to talk about on dates. Sam, you have any scars?”
“Let me tell you about scars,” Sam said, and then proceeded to regale the girl with stories about the myriad holes and punctures and cuts that littered his body, each one another battlefield somewhere. I got the sense that the girl didn’t believe a word he was saying-when he brought up that shrapnel wound from the Falklands, I actually heard her sigh with something near to resignation-but the sad fact is that I don’t think he made anything up. “All of which is to say,” Sam continued, “it’s all about quality of life. If you think you’ll have a better life without that scar, then I say do yourself a favor, sister, and get it taken care of.”
“I will, then,” she said. “Father Santiago says he’s going to get a friend to help pay for it.”
“He have a lot of friends?” I asked.
“Don’t you read the newspaper?” she asked.
Before I could answer again, that no, I didn’t read the newspaper, Eduardo Santiago emerged from a conference room with his arm over a man’s shoulder. The man wore a beautifully tailored charcoal gray suit, a crisp white shirt and a silver tie. On his feet were wing-tips shined to a glow, on his wrist was an understated gold watch with a black face and on his head was a perfectly combed field of salt-and-pepper hair.
He looked like somebody. He looked like a Somebody. But then so did Eduardo in his navy blue suit and tan shirt opened at the collar, enough so that you could still make out the tattoos crawling up from his chest.
“Who is that with Eduardo?” I asked Sam.
“The mayor,” Sam said.
“Of where?”
“Miami,” Sam said.
Eduardo and the mayor shook hands, laughed about something, shook hands again and then the mayor said, as he walked toward us, “And remember to let me know when I can get you stuck in that sand trap again, Father!”
Sam stood up when the mayor was just a few feet away. “Mr. Mayor,” he said, and gave the politician a dignified nod of his head.
The mayor had a flicker of recognition when he saw Sam. And it wasn’t a flicker that screamed with joy. “Mr. Axe,” he said, and nodded right back at Sam, but also quickened his step out the door.
I looked at Sam. “You know the mayor of Miami?”
“I knew his wife,” he said.
“A buddy of yours?”
“Of a kind, yes.”
When you’re a spy, there’s no such thing as too much information. When you’re someone’s friend, the same rules do not apply.
“Gentlemen,” Eduardo Santiago said, “please, come into my office. We have much to talk about.”