“Usually with men like that, a health problem is if someone’s trying to shoot them.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “We had some drinks at the hotel bar and then went for dinner at an Italian place down around Mulberry Street.”
“Well! What a New York gangsterismo evening that was,” he said.
“Seriously,” Alex said, meaning yes. “And Federov introduced me to a friend.”
“That’s where it often gets interesting,” he said. “A person of interest to us, perhaps?”
“You never know. What do you know about the Mafia in Cuba, Mike?” she asked.
“Now or in the past?”
“Either or both,” Alex answered. “I’ve seen The Godfather II like everyone else, but aside from that the whole era is before my time. I assume we have files.”
“Tons of them. You’ll be sorry you asked. You might need a special access with a cosigned request form to see the top stuff. But I can get it for you if you’re interested.”
“I’m interested.”
“Then I’ll try to get you some file-archive access by later today.”
“Good. I’d like to run the friend’s name across the files,” Alex said. “Paul Guarneri. Name mean anything to you?”
“Guarneri only means something as the patriarch of a seventeenth-century family of violin makers in Italy. I’m not up on all the current wise guys; there are too many of them, and it’s not my department.”
“Paul Guarnari didn’t look personally that mobbed up to me,” Alex continued. “Or at least not on the surface. But his father certainly was. Then again, what’s he hanging around with Federov for if he’s not a mob guy? The only use Federov ever had for legitimate businessmen was to shake them down.”
“Where exactly was this meeting again?” Gamburian asked.
“A place called Il Vagabondo in Lower Manhattan. I did some asking around afterward. It’s a mob hangout, not that I couldn’t tell at the time.”
“So as a Fed, if you don’t mind the metaphor, you must have felt like a mosquito at a nudist colony.”
“Pretty much,” Alex said. “But I stuck with Guarneri. He said his family was from Cuba. His father was Italian but married a dancer who worked at one of the big hotel casinos. I think he has some major ideas about trying to get some old property back, including a pile of cash that was stashed somewhere. Does that make sense?”
Gamburian laughed. “Some,” he said. “As soon as Castro is planted and pushing up daisies, all the old mob families are going to be looking for recovery of property. Then who knows what else they’ll be up to. Can you keep the contact alive?”
“Sure,” Alex said. “In fact, I’d like to.”
“Well, you were introduced, so you’d be wise to follow it up. You never know when something small cracks something big. The ‘French Connection’ case was made when two cops wandered into a nightclub and spotted some hoods. ‘Son of Sam’ broke over a parking ticket. You could have a career case over a veal scaloppini in Brooklyn.”
“It was saltimbocca, and it was in Lower Manhattan, but I catch your drift.”
“Speaking of Lower Manhattan, how did the interview go? At the Federal Building?”
“Fine,” she said.
“So you’ll be leaving us and moving to New York.”
“Let’s see if they offer me anything,” she said.
“Ha! They will. New York steals Washington’s top employees all the time. We’re used to it.”
“Thanks, Mike,” she said with irony. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was meant as one.”
“I know,” she said. She rose from the chair and moved to the door. As she opened the door, she turned and asked a final question.
“By the way,” Alex inquired, “what do you hear about Mike Cerny’s widow and family?”
Gamburian reacted with surprise. “Not much,” he said. “They moved back to the Midwest somewhere from what I heard. That’s all I know.”
“She got her widow’s benefits and pension?” Alex asked.
“Why wouldn’t she?”
Alex shrugged her shoulders.
“Were you close to Mike Cerny? Did you know him well?”
“No one knew him very well,” Gamburian said. “He was a cipher to everyone he worked with.” Gamburian adjusted his glasses. “Why you asking?”
“Just curious,” she said. “I’ll look for the organized-crime file later.”
“Enjoy them. Order out for a slice of pizza to go with them.”
He flipped his classified folders back upright and returned to work as Alex’s footsteps receded down the hallway.
Later, past 6:00 p.m. on the same day, Alex was sitting at her desk. She leaned back in her chair and stared at her two computers. She had read everything that had been given to her about Paul Guarneri and his father, Vito Guarneri. The files intrigued her, but increasingly they were small change. Michael Cerny was on her mind.
It was one thing that Janet claimed to have seen him, a sighting linked to the car bomb that killed Carlos. That might have been chalked up to coincidence or an overactive imagination. But why, if someone who looked like Cerny had been seen by a credible source, would there have been a failure to get a file to Alex? Alex had been an integral part of Cerny’s “fatal” final mission. She should have been covered on it.
Incompetence? Maybe?
Was someone holding back because she was FBI and Treasury and not CIA?
Possible.
But overall, it didn’t make sense.
She leaned to her laptop, which had a higher security access code than the desktop console. She entered her primary security clearance code and then entered her second. Both cruised.
A slight tremor came over her. To revisit Michael Cerny via the files was to revisit her personal catastrophe in Kiev and all the sorrow it had brought into her life. It had been less than a year. Was she ready to have so much of it come tumbling back?
She drew a breath. She entered her clearance for the secured site dedicated to the Kiev visit. Another dialogue box opened and asked for her name. She entered it. She remembered how in the painful first weeks after Kiev she had made this same trip and run into cyber roadblocks. More anxiety built. The dialogue window accepted her name. With two tries, it accepted her ID. Then she was back in the HUMINT, the human intelligence, leading up to the presidential visit to Kiev. Files opened. Okay so far.
She cringed as she read them, but unlike the previous times she had visited these sights, the files had not been bowdlerized. They seemed complete and accurate.
Okay, okay, she told herself. This might be a backdoor route to a background file on Michael Cerny. Maybe. Leaning forward, she attacked the keyboard with more gusto. She referenced names including her own. Robert’s. Embassy personnel who had died that day. She found everyone she looked for.